Book Review: City of Mirrors

Justin Cronin's final entry into his Passage trilogy, City of Mirrors (2016), spans nearly a thousand years, moving backwards and forwards through his viral infestation of North America (wherein Vampire-like creatures effectively wipe out the population of the continent), and brings a number of interesting new elements to his post-apocalyptic world.

Originally conceived as a challenge by his daughter to write a novel about "a girl who saves the world" the novel effectively wraps up the story of Amy Harper Belefonte, also known as Amy NLN and "The Girl from Nowhere" as well as the surviving characters from the previous novels. Without going into spoilers, I will say that I felt each of the characters where handled fairly and with the exception of one major plot hole, the story does a great job of showing the terror and beauty of a world devoid of us.

For me, the novel was surprisingly hopeful, leaving the series pretty high up in my list of favourite post-apocalyptic works, and although I complained of the pre-apocalypse flashbacks in the second book (The Twelve), I was expecting them here, and felt they worked for the overall story.

A great, if lengthy, read.