By Justin Cronin
The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?
The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew—and daring to dream of a hopeful future.
But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy—humanity’s only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.
One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.
Along with The Last Star, this was one of my most anticipated series endings of this year. I got both of these books around mid-June, but it took me much longer to finish The City of Mirrors.
A few reasons for that, I think. First, I’d never really realized how dense these books are until I sat down to read The City of Mirrors. A lot happens in the text and very little of it is fluff to be glossed over. The book is 600 pages, but I’m sure they squeezed in another 100-200 pages worth of words. Second, while the book was never calling to me to hurry up and get back to reading it, whenever I did get back to it, I’d read for hours. Which is a problem because I read before bed most often.
All in all, this was a terrific series closer. A writer with an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop writing a vampire apocalypse trilogy sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but the result is just incredible. I would recommend doing a re-read of the first two books before tackling this one. This is one of my all-time favorite series and I regret not doing that myself because I think I would have gotten even more enjoyment out of The City of Mirrors. But I’ll definitely be rereading the series at some point in the future!
