Wool

Alright, so this has been on my to-read list for quite a while and I finally got to it! I'm really disappointed. Unfortunately this was not interesting at all and I feel quite opposed to the five-star reviews and the very high rating it has here on Goodreads. Definitely feels like I one of those moments where I think that I read something different than everyone else.

I don't know how this became so unbelievably boring. It started out very tight, focused and engaging because you wanted to know what happened and then it just shut that down entirely. As soon as anything interesting happens in this book, we flip to a different time, another character etc and climb some stairs. Actually have people going up and down stairs.

I also want to complain because the copy I read has a quote on it saying how it real the world building is basically and I did not find it real at all. I found it flat as hell and the characters felt like they were not talking naturally, I don't know if it's because they live underground and their style of speech has changed but didn't feel like a deliberate choice but just bad dialogue a lot of the time. I didn't really find any of the characters engaging and I had a very hard picturing them in my mind...and I wanted to and I tried! Everyone became kind of little cardboard cutouts acting out the story for me.

I don't usually write reviews but I had wanted to read this for such a long time and then it was such a damn struggle for me to get to the end of this book I really had to. Anyways, this isn't a one star review because I liked the concept of the book and I really wanted to explore that stuff further, there were parts where I was kind of skimming the b plot to get back to the a plot of discovery with the character of Juliette, but then I just became disappointed again because her main purpose was just to kind of keep doing the same thing over and over again of groping around in the dark in various ways. Now I'm thinking on it. I feel like none of the characters grew or changed very much in a believable way, except for the convenience of the story.

Also there was some discussion about why the silo was here and how it was constructed to make lives separate and difficult. I hope that the incredible amount of stairs were a part of that and I was just waiting for like an explanation as to why nobody had come up with a better solution than hundreds and hundreds of stairs all the damn time! No one has solved that in any way? I got really “tired” of hearing how “tired” all the characters were and the heavy-handed classism discourse. Definitely felt like I wanted more exploration and less time spent on build up to very boring events, like so much slow build up for nothing.

There's a lot actually I could just keep going and I don't know, Maybe skim this one if you want to know what the hype is all about but I honestly feel like nothing happened in this book and I don't think that was a style choice. I'm aware that The story continues in other novels, but honestly I'm not going to be reading them.

“It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.”

The world, the characters, the writing, it was all so amazing in this book. I had no idea what to expect going into this book. I had heard a lot of good things about it from people, but went in fairly blind especially with respect to the plot and what it was really about. I basically knew it was a science fiction novel.

And I was so blown away by this book. It was fantastically written with such real, human characters. I really felt everything they were going through and really cared what happened to them. There were so many layers to what was going on with them and how they were coping with finding out everything about their world.

This book unfolds in a very unique way. You are basically placed at a certain point in time with no background and see the events unfold with some flashbacks, but mostly simply following along. I would say the main character is Juliette, because we do follow her the most, but we also follow the events though other characters too, which I loved.

The last thing I want to comment on is the world. I was so fascinated by this idea of 150 story Silos housing people. This whole idea of having to walk up and down stairs to get anywhere was so intriguing. It also raised the question of why there were not elevators! But I think control is the answer. Going back to the Silos, I loved the disparity that they created. It was fascinating to see how where you lived in the Silo affected your station in life and also your career. The culture was designed in this really weird way that was highly unique.

Overall, this was a great read and I'm really glad I took the time to read it. It is 5 “stories” in one but I think reading all five together is important. However the first few stories were not as gripping and action heavy as the last two. And I think some aspects of the last two could be cut to make the book shorter because some plot points did seem to drag on. I also was disappointed with the ending. I feel like there are still a lot of questions that need answering. I know their is a sequel of sorts, but I'm not sure how much of a direct sequel it actually is. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy a unique science fiction world and for people who do no mind longer books that can drag in places.

In a post-apocalyptic world, some guy wants to die, because his wife went crazy and “killed herself” 3 years ago, and so he decides to do the same.

He is the sheriff of a fallout-like bunker, and dying means deciding to go outside. Everybody is afraid, because they want to know if when he goes outside to die, will he clean the lenses wit his wool. The guy is apathetic, and doesn't care one way or the other.

I found the writing to be unbearable. It is supposed to transmit a feeling of hopelessness, but it does so in detriment or character and plot. It is akin to a horror story for me. Give me content, not feelings.

So the main character wants to die. I hate suicidal characters. If means giving up reason and succumbing to emotions. His wife went hysterical, which means the same thing. Characters without intellect doesn't appeal to me.

This was an all drama experience, with nothing for me to hold on to.

Read 1:22/18:08 8%

This story is a very interesting concept and like nothing I've ever read before. It took me in right from the beginning and I found it at times difficult to put down. Which is quite unusual for a sci-fi/post apocolyptic novel for me. It's not something I normally read. But I loved the idea of this the premise behind this novel.

It was very easy to read but I think the only thing that let it down was that I'd have loved to have seen the characters development a little more. We don't really get to know the characters very well and they seemed a lot of the time just to be 2D characters. I've read books where the characters became like a part of my life, that was missing in this book. If he characters had been more developed, if have given this a 5 star rating for sure. I have the other 2 books in the series sitting on my bookshelf so hopefully we get a bit from the characters in those two.

Took me a while to get engaged with it, I was on the fence for the frist 100-150 pages if I would continue but in the end found the story engaging and the second half really kept my interest.

Seems ripe for continuation or branching out from the original story so I will keep an eye out for more from Howey.

Reminds me of The Twilight Zone–one of the hour long episodes that goes interesting places but takes so long getting there that you've lost all interest by the end. There were moments I liked, but mostly there were long descriptions of people climbing up and down stairs.

The characters are all minimally developed (if I can't relate to a female mechanic character, then there are some serious issues that need to be dealt with). The work-related metaphors get old fast (again, if I'm getting tired of mechanical analogies, that's a really bad sign). The “twists” are all easy to see coming, which would be forgivable if they weren't so built up. The world, though initially fascinating, gets less and less interesting and more and more illogical as the story progresses. People do things that no real people would ever do. And, when the characters aren't spending page after page thinking about nothing, the plot takes turns that are either absurdly predictable or just plain absurd.

I thought there was so much potential in the beginning, some fascinating ideas buried within the plodding pace, but by the third book it turned into a cliche action movie (that was still, somehow, paced absurdly slowly)

See this and other reviews at my blog: http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com

I read the omnibus version, picked it up for a cool $1.99, although having read it now, I would willingly pay the $5.99 that it is usually sold for. Anyway, the Wool series so far is made up of five smaller stories of varying lengths from short story to novella in length. Put them all together and it makes something roughly the size of a novel.

The wool stories all take place in a post apocalyptic world, where the surface of the Earth is toxic, and the remains of humanity is stuck underground in a massive silo in order to survive. However, as you can imagine, life stuck inside a silo is not particularly suited to human flourishing. The “powers that be” are not who everyone thinks they are and most of the social constructs (eg, being sent to clean the silo sensors, high costs for electronic communication) have been designed by the silo progenitors with manipulation and crowd control in mind. Broadly, the 5 stories that make up Wool follow events in the silo that are set in motion when a mysterious computer program is discovered, revealing that all in the silo is not as it seems.

The short of it is that I loved this book! The only thing that kept me from giving 5 stars was some pacing problems that sensed in the last story. The last book turned out to be a lot of exposition an explanation which, while it fulfilled my desire to know more about the world of Wool, it dragged the plot pace, distanced me from the story a bit, and I think detracted from the emotional payoff of the climax/resolution of the pentology (pentad, pent something else?).

Two things I love in a science fiction yarn are a creative world, which includes both elegance of description and plausibility, as well a sense of mystery or maybe a better way to phrase it is “secrets yet to be revealed”. I've seen this done very well before, and Wool is no different. Howey gets both just right. Its like Howey makes his characters fight for every piece of his world that he shows them and by extension the reader. Not in the sense that Gene Wolf does (where the narrators are always suspicious, and 90% of the plot can only be figured out by extrapolating on small textual clues), but in the sense that Howey's characters go through a lot of grief to earn every piece of information that the reader gets. While I can imagine a scenario where this kind of tension filled plotting can be frustrating to a reader if taken too far, Howey did it just right and I felt a visceral satisfaction whenever a particularly large part of the puzzle fell into place.

The characters themselves were ok. I liked a lot of the side characters (Knox, Solo, Walker) and the main characters from the first two stories (Holston, Marnes and Jahns), I kind of felt that Juliette and Lukas, who are the protagonists in the last three stories, were a little bit cookie cutter. I also felt that Lukas was a little bit whiny and sometimes irritating and not necessarily well suited for Juliette or as the primary love interest in the latter portion of the book. Anyway, the important pieces were there so I did indeed engage with even Lukas and Juliette, and since for me, this book was more about exploring the post-apocalyptic setting than identifying strongly with the characters, I didn't think it detracted from the experience very much.

In summary, if you like a post-apocalyptic mystery, you can't go wrong with Wool. Its action-packed and sinister mysteries abound!

I walked into this book with rather low expectations on account of it being so very hyped, but I walked out with exactly the sort of apocalypse I was looking for.

The first book works brilliantly as a short story and a hook to the larger omnibus. I see how this book was able to develop a cult status based on Howey giving away chapters. The story did a nice job of subverting my expectations, and whatever I was absolutely sure was going to happen, didn't. That's what made me bump this book up to five stars. For me at least, (and I haven't read a lot of post-apocalyptic sci-fi recently, to be fair), this book was almost entirely unpredictable. Howey establishes early that no character is safe, no solution without cost, and thus he keeps his suspense on high for the entire story.

The world Howey creates also sucked me right in. Everything from the limited resources to the tension between IT and Mechanical works within this tiny spiral. The normalcy of living within a few floors for entire lives, of never inventing elevators in order to preserve stratification (the only reason I can think for not having elevators), of birth control lotteries and registered relationships – it all plays together to complete this society that makes a terrifying sort of sense.

I also can't help but enjoy the dynamic between Juliette and Lukas. I shouldn't have liked it because really they don't have enough time together to establish the kind of bond they develop, but I found them believable nonetheless. I think that if an infatuation were cut off as quickly and cruelly as theirs was only to be relit again with both of them in isolation, desperately needing a voice of sanity and truth... that infatuation would become a dependency if not love. It would become something they both needed, which is how Howey plays it. I'm also somewhat pleased to see the novelty of the woman being substantially the older partner in a relationship.

All of Howey's characters, from Holston to Solo are entirely real and believable. Bernard is maybe a bit obviously villainous as he is malicious from the start, but his true motivation is perfectly righteous, saving him from being too much of a mustache-twirler. My only disappointment was that we didn't get more backstory about his relationship with Lukas. I'm not sure why Bernard trusted him so very quickly. It seems like he should have checked him out more thoroughly for a position of that importance.

The real key to this story, though, is its suspense. Howey is a master of the slow-build, and he finds every source of danger and tension available to his characters. If I had to describe the book in one word, it would be claustrophobia. Everything is packed tightly together, with no room for the reader to take a breath. The characters' panic becomes the readers' panic time and again as the walls move in just a little closer. Even in the second story (probably the more forgettable one for me), climbing stairs is laced with mystery and a question of where danger is lurking. By the time we follow Juliette out into the world and Silo 17, I couldn't put the book down. I kept rushing through to get back to her chapters. I could feel her suffocation, her terror, and her exhaustion. Books 4/5 had me sweating right along with the characters.

The book may still be a lot of hype. The science may not be the soundest. The characters might be a little rushed. However, the intensity of the story made this one of the most enjoyable books I've read all year. That's why I'm giving it the full five stars. It may not be perfect sci-fi, but it's definitely my kind of sci-fi.

So glad that I read this prior to watching the show (which I still haven't watched) Becayse this is easily a new favorite.

This is a prime example of how SF should be written. I loved that I discovered and learned about the world as the characters did. I loved the tension and pressure and relief I felt when the characters felt it.

I went in totally unawares to this book and couldn't be more delighted. Anyone who is a fan of SF set in “our” world should read this.