Peter, wanting nothing more than a quiet life after years of battling virals, is pulled back into a leadership role by the president, who wants his charisma and respected status in the community to help her rally the survivors into a working, sustainable society. The Twelve have been destroyed, and human survivors are beginning to settle down and rebuild their lives. Here was some of that old magic I remember from my first read of The Passage. I already knew how that turned out, and I was impatient to get on with the story of Peter, Sara, Amy and Alicia.īut then I read The City of Mirrors and my fears were allayed. I think my main problem with it is that much of it felt very much like the same events of The Passage, only from a different perspective. This fear intensified with the second book, The Twelve, which to be honest, I struggled to finish. It may have been my mood or just the lack of novelty the second time around, but for whatever reason, I was afraid the magic was gone. Whereas I loved it so much at first read that I lugged the almost-1000-page tome around on the subway to and from work, I found the second read interesting but not quite as gripping anymore. I admit I was a bit apprehensive at first, since I re-read The Passage to remind myself of the story, and found it didn’t quite hold up to my memory of the experience.

I loved Justin Cronin’s The Passage when I first read it years ago, so I was thrilled to receive a Binge Box from Penguin Random House Canada a few months ago with the rest of the trilogy, including an advance reading copy of the conclusion, The City of Mirrors.

The city of mirrors