A review by emmazucati
Shift by Hugh Howey

3.0

I really loved the middle of this book. And I think the third one is good and this was an appropriate build up to that. I just think Howey thought we would care more about the "evil mastermind" and the "bumbling fool who will hopefully become a better person" than I did. I really really don't care about how we got into the silos. I would've enjoyed a 30 page intro, but beyond that, it was just boring. Howey also did a poor job recapping/reminding you of characters so it was a bit of a struggle to find the flow. My understanding is that this one came out all at once as opposed to parts, and I think parts would've been better and smoothed out some of the pacing issues (i.e. reading 200 pages of boring government set up then 50 pages of super interesting silo lives wouldn't have been so obvious if they were in separate installments).
I mention this in another Howey review but this is the book where I shift (get it?) from being vaguely annoyed there's only a couple of women to understanding that he is bad at writing women. (Which makes someone a bad writer, btw. Authors don't get an excuse to leave out 50% of the world population because they're a man.)