The book I chose to read in July, after you lot recommended it, was Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman. All I knew about this book was that it was science fiction/fantasy and that it had been picked as a book of the month at Waterstones once and so I went into it very excited!
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The story focuses on our main man, “The Ferryman” who works in this slightly fictional world where everyone seems to arrive and leave in this ferry. People got about their lives with this process of the ferry being quite important. One day, an event happens that results in our main protagonist’s life being flipped upside down completely and everything around him seems a little more suspicious all of a sudden.
The Ferryman plot – 4.5/5
I’ll be honest, while reading the first third or so of The Ferryman, I couldn’t quite work out where anything was going. I was concentrating really hard to keep up with Cronin’s writing and making sure I was aware of everything that was happening, despite it being slightly odd.
However, there’s a moment where the pace begins to pick up and my interest was really peaked and then, without spoiling anything, a huge thing happens that makes you go “whoa, ok, I didn’t see that coming!” And this was when I really got interested!
So this second third of the book is really interesting as the pace is going at a rate of knots and you’re discovering so much more about the world and what is really happening (still trying not to spoil anything here). However, the final third does then slightly taper off a little bit, as I felt it got a little confused as to where to go once the big reveal happened.
All in all, though, I really enjoyed the plot of The Ferryman and appreciated how unique it was with its imaginative ideas!
The Ferryman characters – 4.25/5
The characters in The Ferryman were another big draw for me. Despite the fact that Cronin wrote the characters in a fairly passive way, I still found myself enjoying them and the journey they went on.
Our main character, “the Ferryman” is engaging enough that you feel for him and the changes that happen to him throughout the book.
We also have some good side characters offering up comedic value, the leader role and even a villain along the way.
You’re not going to read The Ferryman because of its sensational characters but equally, the plot isn’t worsened because we don’t care enough about the people involved in it.
The Ferryman final rating – 4.5/5
The Ferryman starts off with a very eerie tone, one that I mistook for slightly slow but one that you soon find out is for a purpose. It’s a book filled with intrigue that has you guessing for quite some time before dropping a great twist on you. The final third lacks a little in terms of direction but not so much that it lessens from the concept as a whole. With fulfilling enough protagonists, a well thought-out world and some fantastic writing, The Ferryman is a science fiction I think is worth everybody’s time. It’s not too high sci-fi for non-lovers of the genre but is high enough that those who enjoy this sort of thing will get a kick out of its clever direction.
