The Passage

I mentioned a while ago that I was saving Justin Cronin's The Passage for my maternity leave. I did this because the book is frickin huge. 750+ pages huge. Makes me wanna buy a Kindle huge. Chicago area phonebook huge. It sat on my bed stand teasing me during my 3am nursing sessions with Eliott, waiting for me to make good on my word. I finally picked it up with about 3 weeks left in my maternity leave, took off the dust jacket and put it back down again without starting it. Instead went and lifted some weights to train for reading it and devoured the Hunger Games by S. Collins instead.

The Hunger Games was wonderful and took me all of three days to read. In fact about 4 chapters in I went onto Amazon and ordered the other two books in the series. But I digress.

I finally started The Passage with about 1 week left and my leave and just finished it this weekend. It was a great book. Epic, riveting, thought provoking and suspenseful right up until the end.

Then Justin Cronin did something that I loath. In the last paragraph I lost all hope for the characters. With a handful of keystrokes he ruined it for me. For them, the people I had spent so much time following, cheering for, worrying about when I wasn't reading. I know that becoming attached to fictional characters is a novelist's job but cheese and rice Cronin, did you have to go and do that? I was mad. I wanted to chuck the book against a wall. I probably would have done just that had I kept up on my weight lifting but I didn't so instead I just threw it onto the ottoman and swore. Joel looked up from his book, The Game of Thrones, another behemoth, and asked "What?"

"Great book. Lousy ending. Don't read it." I complained.

But now, because the book has been bothering me all weekend, haunting me, I looked it up on line. It turns out the book is the first in a series of three and that the next installment, The Twelve, is due to be released next year.

OK Mr. Cronin, you got me. I'll start lifting weights now.