Review: The Twelve

The Twelve by Justin Cronin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Prepare to suspend all disbelief because this book makes no sense.

What a disappointing follow-up to the first book!

This one starts back at square one with a different cast of characters, and I can see why people recommend reading this pretty soon after the first because it really is hard to keep track of all the names. I even found that towards the end of the book I was forgetting who some people were - the scale is just far too grand and the storyline too chaotic to allow for perfect comprehension.

By this stage, I'm not really attached to any of the characters, and I'm pretty over the whole zombie vibe. This book pauses to make more of a comment on political climate in times of catastrophe and it was so dull for me. Granted, there's far more violence in this book than the previous, but there's also a lot more talking about how the world currently finds order among the chaos and it just felt a little too satirical for me. The government is the Big Bad, which just shows the drastic turn this series has taken - a series in which monsters are supposed to be taking over the world, and we're focused on how evil humankind is. So not my jam.

I enjoyed the initial re-introduction to Lila and to Grey, but it seemed to ridiculous and highly coincidental and that's kind of the way everything went from then on. People miraculously surviving things while others - big players from the first book - were killed off in a sentence, making it obvious their presence in this novel was a nuisance to the author. There are way too many characters to keep track of, and everyone is spread around, leading to multiple viewpoints that change so fast it's hard to really get into the flow of things.

So, to break it down, here's a quick pros/cons list:

Pros:
More violence
More details of original outbreak
More Carter

Cons:
More political
Too many characters
Constantly changing viewpoints
Too much coincidence
Confusing or entirely absent explanations
Characters inspire little empathy
Repetitive

I'm also so incredibly confused as to what's the deal with both Wolgast and Carter. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

So yeah, overall it was a disappointing follow-up, but I've heard the third one is better so I'm looking forward to wrapping up this depressing apocalypse.


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