Book Review - The Passage

The Passage by Justin Cronin.......

766 pages of the most confusing story I think I have ever read.  Was it good though, well umm, I don't want to say NO because we all like different things, but for me well I kept reading didn't I.  Yep I did because I was hoping to make sense of it finally.  Did I?  Well kind of and kind of not.

The back reads...

Deep in the jungles of eastern Columbia Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he's been searching for - and wishes to God he hadn't.

In Memphis, Tennessee a six year old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why her mother has abandoned her.

In a maximum security jail in Nevada, a convicted murderer called Giles Babcock has the same strange nightmare, over and over again, while he waits for a lethal injection.

In a remote community in the California mountains, a young man called Peter waits for his beloved brother to return home - to kill him.

Bound together in ways they cannot comprehend, for each of them a door is about to open into a future they could not have imagined.  And a journey is about to begin.  An epic journey that will take them through a world transformed by man's darkest dreams, to the very heart of what it means to be human and beyond.

Okay you might say well after reading that I should have expected something strange and different.  I did but not what I got, I could never have expected that.  So let's say, this novel is long.  It will possibly keep you reading if, like me, you almost always have to finish a book once you start it, if not then you will probably abandon it at the first sense of total confusion.  This will be somewhere around chapter 5.  

If you continue you will enter into a world, well not one two really, they will be about 100 years apart and yet still be consumed with the same earth changing events.  You will encounter men transformed into the most vile creatures, who ravage the earth and cause the series of events that the book deals with.  You will meet men and women living in primitive conditions, with no real true knowledge of the world as we know it today.  They will battle continuously the smokes as they call them, trying to protect their small isolated community of less than 100.  Then you will meet Amy and from there in you will be even more confused.  When you last met her earlier in the book about 100 years earlier she is 6, now she is thought to be about 15.  Yep go figure.  The battles continue with more gruesome and horrid events and eventually exhausted you will begin to think there is an answer and a chance of peace and restoration for all the characters.  Oh no once again you will be disappointed, more horror and destruction.  So if you like a book that is downward moving, from one horror event to another, with little hope for happiness and a real heart turning event at the end, don't go here.  I looked earnestly for an email address on this book so I could contact the author and ask some questions as there was a great deal of confusion for me.  Really confusing stuff, but alas there was none.  So if you like this kind of story then you'll love it.  Me I'm still reeling from not knowing who or what Peter really is??????????  Oh well on to something nice and light now, I need the rest.

For something a little lighter how about some beautiful honey scented gumnut flowers.  Our gum trees are loaded at the moment and the scent of honey wafts past as I stroll round the grounds.

When the blossoms are all gone we will be left with hundreds of tiny gumnut hats, little brown hats for the fairies to wear.  Until then the smell of honey and the buzz of a trillion bees and the squawking of the native birds devouring the honey filled centres, fills the air.  You just have to love summer.