Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

...and the book totally fell off a cliff. How is it possible for a novel to be so intriguing, so beautifully paced, so full of interesting people and situations, and then, boom, just like that, become turgid and awkward and stuffed to overflowing (and I do mean overflowing) with the world's most tedious characters? Really, I couldn't imagine what Cronin was trying to do. Someone in the Colony, let's say character A, who is the great-nephew of B twice removed, just got killed by a vampire. Or was he the second cousin of B, twice removed? Well, who cares, because we know nothing about him, except that he was related to someone else we also know nothing about. And that he just got killed by a vampire. And in any case, we're on to the next fifty characters, all just as sketchy, and all probably also killed by vampires. Isn't the author supposed to make us care about the characters in his novel? Cronin seems to do everything he can to ensure we won't give a damn about them. And, believe me, I didn't. To make us care even less, Cronin uses the presumed-dead-but-really-still-alive twist, well, so many times I lost count (I'd really like to know what the grand total is, if someone managed to track it). I swear to god, one character was presumed-dead-but-really-still-alive not once, but twice. Sheesh. So whenever someone died I was like, yeah, right, see you in 30 pages. And if they didn't reappear in 30 pages I'd kind of forgotten about them anyway. So, for me at least, this was a masterful stroke that made me care even less about the fate of his characters than I did already. In fact, I was so tired of them popping back up I was really rather sad that I couldn't kill the damned things off myself. Because the first 250 pages were so good I slogged through the next god-save-me 500 pages in a state of disbelief. I mean, it can't be this bad forever, can it? Well, yes, it can. It has to have some redeeming qualities someplace in 500 pages, doesn't it? Well, no, it doesn't. If, by some chance, someone reads this who is at about page 300, someone who is thinking, whoa, I'm shocked at how bad this has become, but I should finish it, shouldn't I? - well, let me tell you, clean your ovens, scrub your toilets, rather than wasting any more time on this book. Not only will you have clean toilets, I guarantee, GUARANTEE, that scrubbing toilets will be much more fun than finishing this awful mess.