Hugh Howey's Wool was
one of the best books I read last year. Original, clever,
well-written, I've recommended it to lots of people. Naturally, I was
excited to find out that there was going to be a sequel.
Shift mainly takes
place before the events described in Wool. The story of Wool,
for those of you who haven't read it (obviously, SPOILERS
ahead) revolves mainly around Juliette, a young woman living,
together with thousands of others, in an underground silo. The world
above is toxic and anyone who is unlucky enough to get kicked out of
the silo dies within a few minutes. In Wool, we don't find out
exactly why things are the way they are. Shift tries
to do that. Through the main character of Donald, we get to
look back at the world before silos, and how it became a toxic
wasteland.
Just like Wool,
Shift was released in parts before it was published as a book,
and just as in Wool, I found the first half to drag on a bit –
maybe because of their episodic nature. The issue I had with Wool,
namely that...
SPOILERS!
Characters
are introduced and fleshed out only to be killed off, turning out
that they weren't important to the main story after all
/SPOILERS
bothered me a bit with
this book too. But, in the end, the biggest issue I had with this
book was that our main character seemed to reach important
conclusions about the secrets that were hidden from him (and from
us), yet these conclusions were never fully revealed to us. Was I not
paying attention? Do I lack the capacity to follow the same logical
steps as he did? I kept thinking that the big revelation was just around
the corner, a revelation of such enormous importance (you want the
truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!) that it kept me turning the pages.
But the revelation never came. Not in a way that I was able to
understand, anyway. In the end, I felt a bit cheated and the hints
that there was a great mystery felt like nothing more than a way for
the author to produce a thicker book.
That said, I still
enjoyed reading this book. I love the world of the silos, the idea
that whole societies live underground, unaware of each other. I want
to find out more about these societies, their psychology, their
religion, their politics. I will be reading the follow-up, Dust,
but my expectations may be a little lower this time.
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