Reviews

I have so many issues with this book.
These people are being deceived on a huge scale and the stuff they are being told is so obviously bullshit, every half-way intelligent person should spot the discrepancies.
Apparently, every single person that figures this stuff out conveniently can't shut up about it in a population well beyond 1000 and over multiple generations so their government can just murder everyone who suspects.

The whole concept of being a silo, a seed for humanity that is just supposed to keep existing without any progress, makes no sense to me. Even if all the leaders could've been kept brainwashed over generations, there just needs a single successful coup by a group of smart people that would allow one of the silos to break away from the old ideology. This silo could easily keep pretending it's still loyal to the cause but internally develop new tech, expand, and progress. Natural evolution baby.
I just can't buy the entire thing. Thousands of people have to all act exactly as the author needs for this scenario to even have possibly developed as it did.

This next part is from my original review addressing just the first 4 hours:
Let's continue with the dying main characters. I didn't expect this to happen with the first main character despite having predicted every plot-twist up to his death including the cause of death. I just expected him to somehow miraculously survive with the help of plot armor.
So, while I wasn't able to predict everything, I did expect everything that was possible to predict.
The big problem with this was mainly the gruelingly slow pacing of this book. It starts out slow, becomes even slower, and gets to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if reading this book would cause time to go backward. Actually, to be fair, the main issue wasn't the slow pacing itself but that waiting for the plot to play out exactly as I expect in slow motion. That just isn't engaging or interesting.
But back to the main character(s).
After this false start with a character that had a lot of effort invested into him to make his death a real surprise (which I commend!), the author tries to pull the same trick a second time immediately after. As soon as the next "MC" was introduced I knew this was a second false start and she would die soon as well.
But it took so incredibly long for her to finally croak, the wait became painful. The author invested even more time into building a deep connection to this MC. But even after heavily foreshadowing her imminent death later on multiple times, we had to slog through endless sentimental bonding bullshit. But because I already knew she would die (and it even was incredibly obvious how it would happen), it all just was a huge waste of my time. Yes, there was quite a bit of well-disguised world-building behind all that but I couldn't enjoy any of it over the frustration of just waiting for the MC to finally kick the bucket.

The next character is the actual MC we will stick with through at least this book and we first meet her 4 hours into the audiobook.

But that is not my only problem with the two fake main characters. All the "good guys" acted so incredibly stupid I wanted to hurl. What was especially frustrating was that the mayor aka the leader of this entire colony was incredibly naive. I already forgot her age but I think she managed to survive up to her 60s in this position and was supposedly headstrong and willful. How the hell did she do that? How the hell didn't she die decades ago to some coup?
The first MC was the highest authority of their prosecution system and while he had a somewhat better reason for his stupidity, he still didn't deserve his position at all. Amateurs every one of them.

All these specific complaints don't even touch on my more general issues with the book.
Nothing about this feels in any way new or interesting to me.
Apocalyptic event, group of survivors in some kind of self-sustaining structure, cut-throat corrupt politics, cult-like social structures, a deep, dark, hidden secrets yadda yadda.
I've all seen it before countless times.
I initially complemented the writing style here but if you think the pacing in the first 4 hours is shit you haven't seen anything yet. This book brings bad pacing on a whole new level.
Everything relevant that happens except the final twist was so heavily foreshadowed it should've been called forehammered. Usually, the book spoils the story of the next hour, and then instead of at least showing us how we will get there, the book instead meanders around, talking about inconsequential shit. At one point we get a very long flashback to the MCs early childhood in the middle of a very tense situation, preceded and followed by quotes from Romeo and Juliette. It's absurd really.
The entire plot felt like watching a sloth trying to put the triangle block into the square hole.

I really liked the way the author built the relationships between characters and the way he built this bittersweet atmosphere of love and regret. I would've enjoyed it all a lot more (and did with the first MC) if I wasn't already sure I was just waiting for the predictable plot to unravel.

I can appreciate an author that demonstrates the willingness to kill well-developed characters but this went too far in the other direction. Almost every POV we see dies. Except for the one character I immediately recognized as having impenetrable plot-armor. So I always knew in dangerous situations how it would end. The idea of killing off apparently important people is supposed to make death less predictable, not more.

More...