Anyone who was enthralled with Justin Cronin's earlier THE PASSAGE trilogy is probably, like me, eagerly awaiting his latest release, THE FERRYMAN, so I was thrilled to get my hands on an ARC. Set on the utopian island of Prospera, this novel focuses on Proctor, a ferryman whose task it is to escort citizens whose lives are coming to a close to the awaiting ferry. From there, the residents of Prospera are sent to the Nursery where they are, in a sense, reborn and sent back to the island. But, as any sci-fi thriller reader expects, something seems not quite right with this process or the world, and soon, Proctor finds himself trying to unravel what's happening.

As a writer, one of the parts I love about Cronin's work is his way of what seems like poking fun at the "rules" of writing. If you've ever been in a creative writing classroom, you've probably been told at some point not to write "genre" fiction. His trilogy, filled with vampires, felt like a challenge to that rule. The Ferryman, meanwhile, breaks one of the most common "rules" in a major way. I can't exactly say which one here since I don't want to spoil his work, but it's fun to watch him pull it off.

I don't love this book as much as his trilogy (though I confess, I still need to read the 3rd), but this was filled with the kind of action and plot twists that make me think that if it hasn't been optioned for film rights yet, it will be soon. It's got a cinematic quality to it.

Thank you to Ballantine and NetGalley for sending me this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

The Ferryman takes place on Prospera, an archipelago whose citizens never truly die. We follow Proctor Bennett, a ferryman for the Department of Social Contracts, whose role is to shepherd people through their retirement.

This book really came out of left field for me in the best way. It was twisty and interesting, with characters I couldn't help but get invested in, even when initially I thought I wouldn't like them at all. The concept was right up my alley, just the right mix of sci fi and dystopia, and even though this book was almost 600 pages, I honestly could've read 200 more pages without batting an eye. Honestly the best surprise this year. I'm not sure there's much that will top it for me. Justin Cronin is a fantastic writer and a fantastic storyteller, and The Ferryman has me wanting to pick up his backlist ASAP.

3.5 rounded up!

The plot in this genuinely surprised me more than once. So much happened! I really liked the last ~30% (significantly more than some of the beginning and middle).

There were some aspects I wasn’t a huge fan of - like some of the dialogue. The pacing also felt a little off and some storylines didn’t feel complete. I also don’t know how I feel about the characters. Some of them were… very flat.

A lot of the things that grated on me in the beginning were relevant to the story later on, so I think I’d need to reread to give a more accurate rating.

The plot was compelling and the mystery kept me interested throughout. I liked the sci-fi aspects of this a lot!

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.