This story is a wild mix of dystopian and science fiction. The main character, Proctor, is an enigma to unravel as you read. The story is told from the voice of several characters. They are working on figuring out the world they live in. The goal is to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. The author does a fantastic job of keeping the reader guessing at every turn. It is an exciting and interesting read to the end.

Storytelling as on Justin Cronin can manage. Every time you think you know what is going on, you discover you don't and for that reason, I will probably read this book again! This would be a great movie!

The Ferryman is a story about a seemingly utopian society on the idyllic island of Prospera. Citizens can focus all their time on the "higher" pursuits of art, philosophy, and leisure. Some citizens start to feel a darkly insidious side to their privileged lives. But that is all it is, just a vague feeling slightly out of their grasp to fully understand. The search for answers takes them on an adventure to find the truth. They surely have no idea what they will learn about their world and themselves.

Bullet Point Review:

I loved the first half of the story, which focused on a few Prosperan citizens living lives that they could dream of until some start to see glimpses of their society that seem to be not quite right. Watching them find clues on their way to discovering what is real and what is not is a compelling mystery.
Because I enjoyed the story's development, the sharp transition to the second half made me question everything that happened in the first half in a pretty jarring manner.
I always enjoy a good versus evil storyline. This story was exactly that until it wasn't.
The development of the story's hero, Proctor Bennett, is very engaging. I learned about Proctor just as he learned about himself and the mysteries of Prospera. The supporting "good" characters were likable and easy to root for, while the "bad" characters had all the traits you love to hate. The major transition in the story made me, and the characters themselves, question what was true.
The story is told through multiple points of view, but the primary narrator is Proctor. We get to experience glimpses of the thoughts and feelings of all the major characters, but this is mainly Proctor's world.
The pace is meandering in the story's first half but in a good way. It explores the main character's discovery of who they are and how they perceive their place in the world.
The setting in the first half is on the beautiful island of Prospera. The weather is always warm and sunny, and everyone has what they desire. It is like a dream. Yet, describing the second half is complicated and would be filled with spoilers, so I won't do that.
Read if you like a mind-bending experience that makes you question what you thought was true and what people might do when confronting challenges that strain the limits of our minds to cope with the complex realities of existence.
The story has me swirling in a mix of The Matrix, The Truman Show, 1984, Inception, and The Time Machine.

This was definitely one of those books that kept me guessing the whole way through and gave me an excellent Aha! moment. It took a little while to immerse myself in the world but once I did, I was hooked. Slow to start and then kept up a good pace until the end.

This is a fascinating treatise on the human condition. What we believe to be true versus what actually is true.
What we believe to be fact versus what is. This story has quite a few twists and turns that always keep you wondering how it's all going to end.
I was surprised but not, in any way disappointed.
I was given this ARC by netgalley for an honest review.

The Ferryman is a gripping sci-fi action thriller. While I thought the start was a bit slow as I was establishing where the world-building was taking me, it didn’t last long before I was sucked into the storyline, trying to place which characters were the good guys and who the real bad guys were. 

This is a book that I went into completely blind. By that I mean I didn’t read the blurb prior to starting this novel and based my request purely on how much I loved Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy. And I have NO regrets. There are no vampires or any supernatural creatures in this story, instead the monsters are purely of the human sort. 

Once I got into the story, I couldn’t put this book down. The action was nonstop as Proctor ran toward the truth, stumbling a few times on the way. I couldn’t wait to understand everyone’s role in his and his friends’ quest to discover the truth about what was really taking place in their world. 

The twists and turns kept me guessing. Just when I thought I had things figured out, BOOM, that was not the case. When all was revealed, it didn’t play out the way I thought it was going to. I love the unpredictable directions this book took while staying a familiar path.

I found the ending to be very satisfying and cannot wait to read the next book Justin Cronin writes. 

*I received a free copy from the publisher for an honest review.

Prospera appears to be a utopian society where people do not die. When it’s time for their life to end, they are sent on the ferry to the nursery. Once there, their memories are wiped clean so that they can start life anew. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately for them, the truth is not what it seems.

Proctor Bennett is our main character, and he is also a ferryman in charge of escorting people to the nursery. Early in the book he is tasked with escorting his father. Things don’t go as planned, which makes Proctor start questioning their way of life.

That is the basic premise of the book, but it takes an expected turn. Unfortunately for me, I guessed the big reveal in chapter two when a certain word started to repeat. One of my favorite books from last year had the exact same reveal. I still thoroughly enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to anyone who thinks the premise sounds intriguing.

I don’t want to spoil anything but I will be thinking about this book and the ending for a while. I was intimidated by the size but it flies by and is an amazing, wild and twisty ride.

Wow this was a long book! I was drawn in to the premise of this story, and it really did not disappoint. An interesting idea that I am happy I explored! It took me a long time to read this book, with some breaks on and off when things got a slow, but overall this was a great book. I will definitely be recommending it to my sci-fi/fantasy loving friends.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

So, this book. This big, sprawling, mess of a book. Not mess in a bad way. It's a good mess. But it's chock full of stuff. At various times I thought of Logan's Run, The Island, The Prisoner, The Matrix, and some of the movies of Christopher Nolan. Justin Cronin certainly likes to draw inspiration from popular culture and turn those inspirations into books that stretch your imagination.

At the start of the book the reader meets Proctor, who is the titular Ferryman. He helps citizens of Prospera transition from their lives of luxury to their next iteration. Proctor has some unusual things happen around him and is thrust into a story with shifting factions, secrets, and a lot of weird stuff.

I honestly think the less you know about this book going in the better. It's a good book. It's well written. There are some strong running themes. And there are moments where you just don't quite know what's going on. It was a good read and had a very distinctive feel.

I received an ARC through "NetGalley" and I am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

This is a story which tells of a tale of interactions between those who are select and those who are not. The main character is Procter who job is a Ferryman which is someone who transport people who fall below a centain reading on their monitor. His job is to deliver these individuals to a ferry where they will then be transpoted to a place identified as "The Nursey" this place is where these individuals are reborn to a much younger self. The last delivery that Proctor made was his guardian father and it did not go well. It went so bad that Proctor was fired from his job.

The story eventually has Proctor working the people at the Annex, the ones that are oppressed. A conflagration happens between the favored and those that aren't. It brings into play a scenario where Proctor becomes a leader.

To discover why Proctor was fired, who the leaders of the oppressed were and how they played a role3. Discover what event the individuals that were leads in the story were in the end and what you ultimately discover as the book finishes.

If you science fiction/fantasy then this a story that you should read.

Have you ever begun reading a book and thought to yourself, “something is just not right here”? That’s exactly the thought I had as I began reading the Ferryman and that feeling continued to strengthen until the big secret was revealed. I was gleeful to find that I had almost predicted the twist and continued to read with much delight because the book actually goes on to resolve many of the questions The Big Twist brought up.
The book follows Proctor Bennett from his arrival on a ferry from the Nursery at the age of sixteen to his adult life where he’s risen to the rank of Director, a senior Ferryman. The Ferrymen are those who gather up the individuals who’ve gotten close to the end of their lives and return them to the Nursery where they can be reborn and live life anew. The island of Prospera seems an almost utopian place where people never truly die, but the residents can never pass the Veil and leave to the outside world. All those who have passed the Veil have never been heard from again. Proctor has always enjoyed his job, up until he’s escorting his father to the ferry and the man flees in fear and as Proctor hauls him back, whispers “It’s all Oranios”. This, accompanied by the guilt and trauma he feels from his father’s final journey, gnaws at Proctor until his very life begins to unravel at an alarming speed.
I spent the first half of this book highly intrigued and speculating about where exactly this story was going to end up. Proctor was a successful man until the stressors of his life began to catch up with him and he started looking into the mysterious Oranios. He made some absolutely mad choices and at the half-way mark, I thought he was going completely nuts. If it weren’t for the suspicious amount of surveillance and a woman named Thea tracking him down for unknown purposes, it would have been really convincing that he was just losing his mind. I really liked Proctor and sympathized with his plight and thought the secondary characters introduced, particularly Thea, were great.
Overall, I was very entertained by this and was left feeling vaguely confused but in a good way. This book is weird in a way highly reminiscent of the show 1899 - trust me, if you’ve watched it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The writing was evocative and at times philosophical without feeling pretentious, which I loved. I can see myself reading Justin Cronin’s other works at some point, though I admit dystopian books aren’t high on my reading list these days. The Ferryman is unlike any book I’ve read recently and will definitely leave me thinking about it for some time to come. The ending thoroughly wrapped up the plot and was more in depth than I was expecting from this type of surprise conclusion.

This is not my normal genre and that's probably a factor in my rating.

The prologue intrigued me, though, and I thought I wouldn't have any problem with this. But, I was wrong. This is a very science fiction and dystopian based story, and it really has to be something you enjoy. I did finish it, but it took me awhile to read and understand what was going on.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is a hard book to write a review for. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it was the kind of book that I found myself reading in chunks (which isn’t at all like me) but I needed each chunk to settle and be absorbed before I could look at the next one. The writing was excellent and even though there were layers of the story and twists and turns that made it a little hard to swallow at times I thought it came together pretty well. I thought the characters were done really well, I didn’t like most of them, but that’s ok. I thought this was a creepily realistic dystopian future story and I can’t do a better job of describing it than the description made (plus I worry about spoilers) so I am not going to try to sum it up at all. This was my first book by this author but I think, after a few palate cleansing books, I may have to look up more of his work.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of "The Ferryman" by Justin Cronin. This was an absolutely perfect 5-star read and I could not get enough of it. I honestly think its best if you go in not knowing much about the plot. I was along for the ride and what a ride it was. Proctor Bennett is our main companion through this journey and he is a highly likeable, intelligent, sympathetic person. This was my first time reading a book by this author and now I am scrambling to get my hands on the other books he has authored. I can't wait to re-read The Ferryman; one of those books I wish I could wipe from my head and read for the first time again!

I’ve been curious about Cronin’s work since the success of his earlier trilogy, The Passage, so I was excited to receive this advance copy of his new book. It didn’t work for me. This story is all over the place. First of all, it’s 500+ pages. The plot is messy with competing storylines. Each story was intriguing on its own and could have been broken into 2 separate books. The world-building was excellent and the characters were interesting. However, there were a lot of trippy, weird moments that had me wondering what I was reading. The writing was good enough to keep me reading but I was very disappointed in the end.

Several years after the conclusion of The Passage Trilogy, Justin Cronin returns with a standalone work of speculative fiction that is just as thought-provoking as it is mind-bending.

I'm hesitant to summarize the plot of The Ferryman, or compare it to anything in pop culture, because I don't want to give anything away. I went into this book having only read the blurb, and as a result, The Ferryman managed to consistently surprise me, going in directions I wasn't expecting as Cronin genre-jumped with ease. Briefly, The Ferryman is about a utopian island society called Prospera, where the temperature is moderate, the sun is always shining, and the bright blue waters are warm and calm. But of course, all is not what it seems in this isolated paradise -- and that's all I'll say.

Cronin is such a gifted storyteller, and his talent is on full display in The Ferryman. While weaving a complex, layered plot, he also develops rich characters and balances exciting action sequences with more pensive, philosophical musings. This is a long novel, but it's engrossing from beginning to end with masterful pacing and a smooth narrative flow. Cronin's writing has a readable ease to it, even though there is nothing simple about The Ferryman: The world-building of this novel is complex and detailed.

Cronin effortlessly combines elements of science-fi, fantasy, thriller, and contemporary fiction in his exploration of themes including power imbalances and class distinctions, wealth and privilege, climate change, family relationships, the complex manifestations of grief, and the power of artistic expression. Throughout The Ferryman, he is asking the reader a question: What does a contented, well-lived life really look like? And he answers that question in beautiful, poignant, surprising ways. The Ferryman was such a rewarding, surprising reading experience, and I'm grateful to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the advance reading opportunity.

My deepest thanks to NetGalley and Ballentine Books/Random House for the ARC on what will no doubt become one of the big book events of the year.
I'm forever in awe of authors who take on the formidable task of world-building. And I knew Justin Cronin, whose 'Passage' trilogy thrilled me, would not disappoint in that daunting task.
His gorgeous, idyllic, utopian island of 'Prospera' I can only assume is all that's left in a post-apocalyptic world........ or is it?
But like many other utopian never-neverlands, Prospera's a heaven-on-earth only for its wealthy upperclass residents. Toiling to support and service all their needs is an oppressed underclass of working stiffs. In that regard, it resembles the toxic class divisions Fritz Lang's classic silent film "Metropolis".
The 'haves' live in Club Med luxury until their implanted monitors indicate they're old enough to expire. But that only entails a ferry ride to a mysterious neighboring island, where some new scientific miracles wipe their memories and physically reconstitute them as newly re-conceived adolescents, ready to start life over again. But meanwhile, the Prospera proletariat, fed up with their impoverished, enslaved lives as third-class citizens, are ripe for revolt and revolution.
The book's central figure Proctor Bennett, holds the exalted position of overseeing and calming Prosperans on their life-renewing ferry rides, But when his own father's passage goes strangely awry, deep dark impenetrable riddles about Prospera emerge. And Proctor finds himself plunged into uncovering long hidden truths while he's unknowingly enlisted by leaders of the lower class rebellion about to explode the island.
I did truly love this part of the story, which takes up about two thirds of the book......it throws in all the mystery, action and suspense of all those similar sci-fi/action-adventure Dystopias...(like 'Logan's Run', 'Soylent Green' and even 'The Time Machine'.
Even if you're tempted to guess the secrets behind Prospera, nothing can prepare you for the Double Whopper of a giant Twist that Justin Cronin detonates here.
But this is where the book stopped being fun to read for me and turned into more of a laborious chore.
As staggering as the reveal is (a mindblower, take my word for it), Cronin then audaciously attempts a parallel double-narrative structure, forcing you to keep track of his pre-Twist and post-Twist world building and characters. I'm sorry to say it developed into a sometimes confusing, tiresome slog for me and after awhile, seemed endless.
While I admire the sheer ambition on display, as well as Cronin's meditations on the nature of humanity, the book's propulsive engine slows to a crawl after the reveal. And that results in turning "The Ferryman" from a zippy, page-turning thriller into dense, hardcore science fiction. (with much description and little dialogue interaction)
Thought provoking, yes.......but not written to make you stay up late, eager to find out what happens next. In fact, I couldn't help breathing a sigh of relief after finishing the long-time-in-coming epilogue.
There's so much I enjoyed, thrilled to and stood in awe of here, that I can't help but give out 3 stars. But the book's third-act voyage into....well, whatever, I wouldn't dare say........left me not engrossed, but reading it from a respectful distance. It's a feast of a book, but every reader will make up their own minds about the courses served up.

Do you love post-apocalyptic fiction? If so, add Justin Cronin's new release to the top of your list. The Ferryman is a stand-alone book (yay - no waiting for the next volume to come out) with a very satisfying story full of surprises and reveals. Yes, I anticipated some, but that was fine because others surprised me - and the predictable plotlines unfolded with unique twists. Cronin's world-building and character development are outstanding. Excellent science fiction should leave the reader with much to think about - post-reading rumination. The Ferryman did just that.

Fans of Project Hail Mary will likely enjoy this book. I predict this novel will be short-listed for the major SciFi awards this year.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an electronic ARC in exchange for a review.

Ok, so I got an ARC of The Ferryman and it was not for me. It should be. I should be the damn target audience. I grew up as the singular child of speculative fiction, in books and movies. From Logan's Run and A Wrinkle in Time, I've never ever stopped with my speculative fiction obsession. But, here we are. Proctor Bennett is a Ferryman. He brings people at the end of their life to the ferry so that they can retire and be reborn with no memory of their past lives, aside from the occasional deja vu. I won't go further as to not give any of the plot points away but from this premise Cronin spins his novel out and the trouble begins. The characters have no voice of their own. there's a large cast of characters but it's all Proctor (who is VERY 2 dimensional himself) and the satellites of Proctor's needs, wants, and Deus Ex Machina when necessary. If you enjoy The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, Black Mirror, speculative fiction (esp from Stephen King), movies like Dreamscape, Inception, Scanners, the Matrix, LOST, St Elsewhere, you'll recognize pieces as they are inserted willy-nilly into this novel giving it a very disjointed and wholly unoriginal feel. A copy of a copy of a copy... Not unlike Babel, The Ferryman groans under the weight of simply not being as good as the disparate source material that it borrows from. The points Cronin attempts to make about class, love, loss, grief, and friendship are simplistic and wielded like a hammer bludgeoning with already widely accepted concepts. The third act careens around Do you know the memes about how men write women? "She breasted boobily to the stairs..." yeah, that's pretty accurate here.

I've seen this tagline all over Cronin's books and author bio "readers compared to the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Margaret Atwood". Allow me to disabuse you those comparisons right now. I'm probably in the minority here because he's a beloved author and The Passage sold a trillion copies with rave reviews abound. I have to admit I'm tempted to hateread The Passage to find out if it's more of the same or if The Ferryman is simply a stumble.