Do you remember when Harry Potter was camping in the woods in the Deathly Hallows? It's worse than that. There is an awful lot of wandering, diving and doing lots of – ultimately inconsequential – stuff, when there were actually more interesting things for the reader to explore. The last three chapters are much, much longer than the first two chapters.

Other characters introduced are laughingly flat and illogical. Juliette is a strong woman, but I just can't relate to her or root for her. The last three chapters have a common protagonist, a young female mechanic: Juliette.Īnd inexplicably, the author drops the ball right at this point. Those were the two chapters that I enjoyed tremendously. The second chapter deals with the Silo's mayor, trying to find out why Sheriff Holston acted like he did, and unraveling the hidden power structure of the Silo that she herself hadn't understood fully. It's the main riddle of the first chapter, and it's deftly handled with a nice turn of events. One of the big mysteries is why all those delinquents actually clean the cameras, before walking off to die. The execution is called “cleaning” the condemned is put into a life suit (that's not really working), gets some woolen cleaning pads and is shoved out of the Silo where he cleans the cameras' lenses showing the inhabitants the world outside. Which is not only anathema in this society, but results in an automatic death sentence, without any need for an investigation. The reader is immediately thrust into the action and needs to orient himself, and quick: Sheriff Holston, the top law enforcement officer of the Silo, enters his office, wishes his deputy a good morning and casually says that he would like to go outside. The book's setting is the eponymous “Silo”, a metal tube mostly underground where the remnants of mankind live, locked away from the barren and toxic outside.

It started as a short story, but expanded into more parts, finally got published as an Omnibus edition, and gained a prequel (Shift). Wool by Hugh Howey is a dystopian science fiction novella, originally self-published for Amazon Kindle. Wool – Omnibus Edition (The Silo Series) ¶

Wool omnibus edition