City of Mirrors
3.5 If you have read The Passage and The Twelve you will read City of Mirrors. If you haven't read the rest of the trilogy, then I have no idea why you would be picking this up since picking up the last of a series never works out and in this case especially, City of Mirrors does not stand on its own. I did not re-read the first two books despite the years long wait for this final chapter. I hoped I would be reminded enough about the characters and plot and I was, which speaks to the strength of the earlier entries in this trilogy. However, the book did suffer from my poor memory a bit. While the exposition was well done, I found that I did not retain enough feeling towards some of the characters to fully appreciate their final contributions or feel true satisfaction when finding out how it all turned out. Perhaps Cronin anticipated many of his readers would have spotty memories since he some introduced new characters (for all intents and purposes) and devoted a lot of time to fleshing them out. Unfortunately, the exemplar case of this was Dr. Fanning, aka Zero (or is it Zero, aka Dr. Fanning?), who had a fantastic back story, but one that ultimately rang false. Zero ends up, despite some mighty efforts to explaining his motives, a one-dimensional villain without redemptive qualities that make the reader root for him or alternatively, wholly evil, which would make the reader sad or terrified. He literally becomes Dracula and unfortunately, since he is so dislikable, a bad Dracula. Cronin also did something else I wasn't fond of – he basically started a new book at the end of this one. Entirely new characters hundreds (?) of years after the conclusion of events in City of Mirrors go off and do some stuff that eventually brings everything full circle. These new characters, in my opinion, were not needed to wrap things up. Things were wrapped up basically fine, but I suppose for those who like the found “footage” sort of thing Cronin has had going that it works to tie the (far future) present to the past. Overall, I do not regret reading City of Mirrors. I thought it was an adequate end to the series and even 2 months or so after I finished, I still remember the general plotline, so it works on some level. However, I can only say this as someone who loved The Passage enough to get through the horrid The Twelve and still pick up this book three. If you have already done two-thirds of the series, pick this us and ride it out. It is nice to get closure and also pick you up a bit from The Twelve misery. If you haven't read Cronin, well, I wouldn't pick this as my first go – but as I said at the start of this short review, why would you? Go get The Passage for gosh-sakes. Buy, Borrow, or Burn? Borrow if you read the first 2 entries in the series.
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