It has really been unintentional…this ignoring of my husband but it really couldn’t be helped.  I was completely engrossed in Justin Cronin’s, The Passage, which is coming out on June 8.  Joe mentioned in his blog about BEA that he was reading this and had actually met Justin Cronin and that sparked my memory that I had this book in my stack.  I picked the book up and thought to myself…”do I really want to invest my time in this 704 page novel by an author I have never read that is about the end of civilization as I know it and a little girl who is the key to saving it?”  Well after investing my time the past two weeks I’m now saying to myself….”I’m so glad I did and cannot wait for my customers to read this!”

I will start by saying that I have not really jumped on the “vampire bandwagon” so I was very wary that I would not like this book but as I continued to turn the page I realized that this novel is so much more than that.  The “virals” as they are called are not your hipster, gelled hair, angst driven vampires of today nor are they the Count Dracula type.  These creatures are the result of a government experiment to create  “super soldiers” that have escaped from the underground lab where they were created.  At the center of the story is Amy–a six year old girl who is totally connected to “The Twelve” and maybe the key to bringing civilization back to the way that we know it, or close anyway.

Dan Chaon (one of my favorites)  author of  Among the Missing and Await Your Reply wrote a great review of The Passage and what he said is exactly how I felt about this book:

“There is a particular kind of reading experience–the feeling you get when you can’t wait to find out what happens next, you can’t turn the pages fast enough, and yet at the same time you are so engaged in the world of the story and the characters, you don’t want it to end. It’s a rare and complex feeling–that plot urgency pulling you forward, that yearning for more holding you back. We say that we are swept up, that we are taken away. Perhaps this effect is one of the true magic tricks that literature can offer to us, and yet it doesn’t happen very often. Mostly, I think, we remember this experience from a few of the beloved books of our childhood.

About three-quarters of the way through The Passage, I found myself in the grip of that peculiar and intense readerly emotion. One part of my brain couldn’t wait to get to the next big revelation, and I found myself wanting to leapfrog from paragraph to paragraph, hurtling toward each looming climax. Meanwhile, another part of my brain was watching the dwindling final pages with dread, knowing that things would be over soon, and wishing to linger with each sentence and character a little while longer.”

Believe the hype…is really all I can say about this one!!!  It’s just that good especially if you are wanting a page turner that you just can’t stop reading!!  The best thing is that The Passage is just the beginning!  This is the first of a trilogy and I can tell you that I’m already on the list to get the ARC of the second book!!

My poor husband . . .

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