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A review by pkiwi
Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
2.0
The only reason this gets two stars is because at least the setting was interesting and for some arcane reason, I actually wanted to know how this book ended. So sit down and prepare for a long, asinine review.
What a piece of drivel. I picked it up, read the first two books, put it down. Boring. Then I figured it was this amazing sci-fi book Goodreads keeps trying to recommend me (I read the Dutch translation which is very unhelpfully called Silo, not Wool) and I thought: 'Well, if everyone considers this such a masterpiece, maybe it will pick up again from book 3 onward.' It did, but only just.
Wool suffers from 'explaining-every-minor-thought-process-in-excruciating-detail'-syndrome. To me, that's a sign of bad writing. Beginners do that. Endlessly telling me what everybody is supposed to be feeling, thinking, etc. without letting the characters and their actions speak for themselves. Boring. It clogs up the story and makes for bad pacing. I could skip whole sections and not even miss anything - all important information would be repeated ad infinitum anyway.
The main idea - people living in a silo, the problem of preventing the community from breaking down - is actually quite interesting. But the characters are so flat (see above) that all nuance is lost. At some point, I held hopes for some of the characters being more 3d than I thought, but no, at the end the book firmly establishes that BAD is BAD and GOOD is GOOD. Boring.
This book should have stayed a novella, and it shows.
What a piece of drivel. I picked it up, read the first two books, put it down. Boring. Then I figured it was this amazing sci-fi book Goodreads keeps trying to recommend me (I read the Dutch translation which is very unhelpfully called Silo, not Wool) and I thought: 'Well, if everyone considers this such a masterpiece, maybe it will pick up again from book 3 onward.' It did, but only just.
Wool suffers from 'explaining-every-minor-thought-process-in-excruciating-detail'-syndrome. To me, that's a sign of bad writing. Beginners do that. Endlessly telling me what everybody is supposed to be feeling, thinking, etc. without letting the characters and their actions speak for themselves. Boring. It clogs up the story and makes for bad pacing. I could skip whole sections and not even miss anything - all important information would be repeated ad infinitum anyway.
The main idea - people living in a silo, the problem of preventing the community from breaking down - is actually quite interesting. But the characters are so flat (see above) that all nuance is lost. At some point, I held hopes for some of the characters being more 3d than I thought, but no, at the end the book firmly establishes that BAD is BAD and GOOD is GOOD. Boring.
This book should have stayed a novella, and it shows.