Merry Wanderer of the Night + TIME

The Passage

I don't normally read science fiction books or fantasy books or books that are really good for building houses. And honestly when I first heard about The Passage

, the blockbuster of the summer, I wasn't interested at all. I first heard about it on Books on the Nightstand back when there was still snow on the ground, and they kept talking about this book that wasn't coming out until June that was about "vampires" and the government and one little girl who could save it all. Okay I thought, and I care why? So what possessed me to buy this book, this humongous book about a military experiment gone wrong, is still a mystery to me. But I did buy it, and I started it the day I got it, and I could not put it down. The story starts out with Amy Harper Bellafonte, a six-year-old girl who is left in the world alone. She has never been to school but is very smart, although it's hard to tell sometimes because she never speaks.

An FBI agent named Wolgast is supposed to take her, kidnap her basically, for the government. But as he is driving with her he gets a feeling that what is happening just is not right. He becomes obsessed with protecting her from this screwed up world they live in, in the not so distant future I might add. While the premise to the story is actually really interesting, it's really not science fiction, what really drew me into this book was the writing. The totally fabulous writing. Really, Justin Cronin is an awesome writer.

The scene started changing then. Grey felt movement all around him, like the earth was stretching; something was different about the snow, the snow had started moving, and when he lifted his face to look, it wasn't snow he saw anymore but rabbits: thousands and thousands of fluffy white rabbits, all the rabbits in the world, bunched so closely together that a person could walk across the yard and never touch the ground; the yard was full of rabbits. And they turned their soft faces toward him, pointed their little black eyes at him, because they knew him, knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school, the stragglers, the ones who were alone; and that was when Grey knew that it wasn't his daddy anymore, lying in the blood. (82)

When I came to that passage (no pun intended!) I just knew this book was more than what it appeared. It's so hard to put it into words without turning people away from it. I mean, there are these vampire things but they're really not vampires at all. Not the way we know them at least, and they're not really even referred to as vampires until about halfway through the book. So this not vampire fiction. Just put down that cross and garlic.

Now, after I've gone on about how great this book is, let me say that it wasn't perfect. It's wonderful and amazing for the first half of the book, and then the main character just kind of disappears. And we have to learn about these new people for two hundred pages, all the while wondering what happened to the perfectly nice characters we met at the beginning of the book. I felt like I was just reading to find out if the old characters would come back again or not. I think that section could have been chopped down a lot. This could have easily been a 500 page novel, which is less scary though still big. Also, I didn't realize that this was the first book in a trilogy so when I reached the end I was a bit disappointed. Now I can't wait for the next book to come out... but I have to wait about two years for it. It's like Harry Potter all over again!

So the verdict is this: Read The Passage, soak up the first 300-some pages and bask in their wonderfulness, speed through the bits that get a little boring, and then when it starts to get better again remember that it's the beginning of a trilogy so the end is a little messy. Never fear, you just have to wait for what happens next. I give this book a B.

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The Passage + TIME