The Passage by Justin Cronin; literary, post-apocalyptic; 704 pages.
This book is getting a lot of hype, and is predicted to be THE hot book for this summer (if you listen to Random House), so I was excited to dig into it. Also, it's got vampires, and a post-apocalyptic setting, so it should have been right up my alley. That said, I was disappointed with this book, and I'm not entirely sure why. Part of it may be that it just didn't live up to my expectations, but I also think Cronin's writing style isn't very well suited to this genre: there are vast stretches (100+ pages at a time) where nothing much happens, which should have made it a great character-driven story, but most of the characters remained pretty flat, and the relationships felt forced. There were also a lot of points where the plot would start to go one way, only have that storyline abruptly terminated; after a while, it felt kind of gimmicky. All of this could be chalked up to how long it took me to read this behemoth (two months!)--maybe it's better if it's read over a week? There's also the abrupt shift in style about 200 pages into the story: all the characters we've been getting to know disappear as the story jumps 100 years into the future. Cronin does bring this back together at the end (to a point), but the plotting very loose and not a great as it could have been.
My last beef was that Cronin's world building wasn't that original, at least not if you've read much of this genre. There were points where I could look at the story and list the movies or books that were being imitated. Overall, I think this story would be enjoyed more by literary fiction fans, rather than scifi or dystopia readers. Fans of biological thrillers would enjoy the first section of the book, but I'm not sure if the dramatic shift in tone and style would go over well. I'd be interested to hear other opinions on this if anyone else reads it.
(I read the advanced reader copy Patrick picked up at ALA; if anyone wants it next, let me know!)
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