Tag: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Justin Cronin – The Passage | Review

Title: The Passage

Author: Justin Cronin

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 998

Rating: 2/5

 

Justin Cronin - The Passage

Justin Cronin – The Passage

 

Okay, strap yourself in. This review is going to be interesting because of my system in which I match the word count of my reviews to the number of pages that a book has. The Passage has lots of pages and so I need to write a long review, but I really don’t have much to say. It was just a disappointment.

There’s been a lot of hype around this book, particularly on BookTube in the last couple of years or so, and I really don’t understand it. True, I went into it blind and didn’t know too much of it, but I gather that it’s been compared to The Stand by Stephen King, which is one of my favourite books. Yeah, no. Comparing this to The Stand is like comparing one of my doodles to a Picasso painting.

True, it does have the whole post-apocalyptic survival thing going for it, but then it also takes the whole “chosen onetrope and just amps it up until it’s downright ridiculous. It also has vampires, or at least something a little like them, but that just made it feel like Cronin was stealing ‘Salem’s Lot from Stephen King as well. And while the vampires here aren’t sparkly, I’d rather read all of the Twilight books than have to re-read The Passage. Although I’d prefer to do neither if it’s all the same to you.

 

Stephen King - The Stand

Stephen King – The Stand

 

One of the big problems with The Passage was that the characters were uninteresting. It’s not even that they were unlikeable, they just weren’t much of anything. It was the literary equivalent of eating lettuce, but when there’s almost 1,000 pages you want something a little more substantial. And I’m saying that as a vegan.

I buddy read this with a couple of friends from BookTube, and none of us enjoyed it. I found it such a slog that when I got about halfway through, I switched it out with The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins to make it my bedtime book. I figured it might help me to fall asleep, and I was right. It ended up taking me the best part of a month to finish.

One of the main problems that the three of us had with it is that it could’ve been an okay book if it had been better edited. I can’t imagine why they let it go out at this length unless they were planning on using the length itself as a marketing ploy, and I’m pretty sure from reading this that you could get the entire trilogy into a shorter book than The Passage and it would work well.

 

Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot

Stephen King – ‘Salem’s Lot

 

There are just prolonged periods of nothingness and sub-stories that just don’t add anything to it. Part of this might be because I didn’t give a damn about the characters, but I’m pretty sure at least some of it is down to the way that it’s written. It reminded me of Dune by Frank Herbert in a way, because there’s a long slog in the middle of Dune where nothing much happens. Unfortunately for Cronin, Dune was still a good book, whereas The Passage fell flat.

I also had a problem with the actual writing. There are times when I’ll read a book that I didn’t much like but where I’ll still be able to respect the author’s writing style. For example, I didn’t like The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, but I did at least like some of the individual sentences. Here, though, it just feels a little sloppy, another fault that could have been fixed with tighter editing.

So it all comes down to the fact that it’s just longer than it needs to be and not particularly well written. A book like this shouldn’t bore the reader, especially given the concept. Cronin somehow took a great idea and made it as exciting as watching a children’s television show. And like the salad that it reminds me of, it’s just bland, tasteless, and I think the leaves might have gone off a little bit, too.

 

Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin

 

Of course, this is all just my opinion, and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who loved the book. Thinking about it, though, I’ve never come across any. I’ve seen lots of people who were excited about reading it, but I don’t think I ever saw any reviews from them. Perhaps they had a similar experience to me. For our part, all three of us in the buddy read said that we would have DNFd it if we weren’t reading it with other people, and that doesn’t bode well.

And can we talk about how weird it is that the book was being sold brand new for £2.99 because Waterstones apparently loved it? It also came with reading group discussion prompts, which I’ve always hated. It seems a little pretentious to me, and our little reading group only had one question when we finished it. “Why did we read this?”

So if you’re thinking about reading this book, I’d probably suggest skipping it and reading something else. It comes with a little list of suggested further reading at the end of it, which understandably includes The Stand. The Passage is a pretender, a wannabe, and while I applaud Cronin on taking a shot at it, I think he missed the target. I can’t imagine ever wanting to read the rest of this trilogy, although I’m not saying I’d never read Cronin again. I just wouldn’t waste my time on something with 1,000 pages that should have been shortened to 350.

The biggest crime for me is the waste of the idea. It has every right to be a great book, it just isn’t. It’s a shame that someone else didn’t get their hands on it – or even just a really good editor. Congratulations if you read this far. We finished it.

 

Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin

 

Click here to buy The Passage.


Carlos Ruiz Zafon – The Shadow of the Wind | Review

Title: The Shadow of the Wind

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 522

Rating: 2*/5

 

Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon – The Shadow of the Wind

 

Well I guess the short and simple version here is that I was disappointed by this. You ready for the long version?

This book had its pros and cons, and I can totally see why a lot of people like it. At the same time, though, I’m also surprised I haven’t heard more people giving it negative reviews. For me, it was pretty dull and I found myself repeatedly zoning out and losing interest.

Part of the problem is from the main character, Daniel, who made a lot of decisions that I didn’t agree with. He developed an unhealthy obsession for someone, let himself into their house and walked in on them having sex, and then later he started sleeping with someone who was engaged to a dude in the army. He just acted like a bit of a douche throughout and I found it hard to really care about him. He was spoiled, entitled and the kind of protagonist where I just want to see them fail.

In fact, the main problem that I had with this book was the fact that it was like watching a bad magician. I could tell when I was supposed to feel excited or scared or to laugh at the book, but the fact that I could tell I was supposed to do it made me less inclined to actually do so. It was like being in the studio audience for an unfunny comedy and feeling awkward when they flashed up big “laughtersigns.

 

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 

Sure, there were bits here and there where it was beautifully written, and it’s a very “quotablebook. But that’s not what I look for when I read something, and there’s no point being able to write decent sentences if the book as a whole just bores someone to tears. I wouldn’t have bothered to even finish reading it if I’d been reading it by myself, but because it was a buddy read and I’d organised it, I felt as though I had to. But it didn’t get any better.

And we’re now getting to the point at which my review is resembling the book, because I don’t have anything else to add here but I have another 150 words to write to meet my word count. For those of you who didn’t know this, my word count for my reviews matches the page count of the book, and so I write longer reviews for longer books.

You could condense this review to 300 words and it would be better. Which is kind of funny because you could condense the book to 300 pages and it would be better for it, too. Instead, it just felt bloated and a chore to read, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to read another Zafon book in the future. I don’t really have “reading slumps”, but if I did then this book would have given me one. I had to switch to an Agatha Christie book afterwards to enjoy reading again.

 

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 

Click here to buy The Shadow of the Wind.