A review by desibaker83
The Twelve by Justin Cronin

I love, love, loved The Passage. This one, though, was...meh. I really enjoyed certain parts but I got a little annoyed by the heavy hand with religion and the military. Seriously-the military totally killed 99% of the world developing a ridiculous weapon and everyone seems a-ok with a new hardcore military system and secrecy is standard where there's virtually no freedom? Um, ok.

And the rape scenes. Oh my, I kinda get why he added them but it was a bit much for me.

I actually like that all of my favorite characters haven't died yet, but it feels like things wrap up too nicely at points.

Oh, and the classic horror story bit of misogyny someone else noted-if you're a woman and you have sex in this book, bad things will happen to you. There are few women leads anyway by this book. Amy-virgin Hero. Alicia-possibly virgin and a bit of a hero but horrible things happen to her after she shuns Peter for the military. Sara-abducted, raped, child stolen. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Nitpicking, probably.

On the same horror story rules note-I liked the diversity in the first book in a genre lead heavily by the white male type, but this seems increasingly to not be the case after The Passage. Can we keep a little more of the non-WASP males, please?

The main characters left from the end of book one are also much weaker in this book. I loved the character development before, and Cronin did a great job on some of the side characters, but the main characters were lacking throughout much of this book. Some of their actions felt out of character.

Overall, good, but not on par with book one.