Wool by Hugh Howey

I bought this signed hardback from Powell’s Book Store in Portland Oregon.

I have been hearing a lot about this book from every direction. Audible, Amazon, and a lot of friends have pushed it at me. But I wasn’t impressed by any of them; most of the time when a writer is unable to get a story published it is for a good reason. Wool is an exception, at least the story as a whole is, I am not sure I would have made it much past the first section of the book if I had to wait for the next section to come out. I want to say a big thanks to all of the people that encouraged Hugh Howey to keep writing.

I enjoyed reading Wool, enough so that I stayed up all night reading it.

The entire time I was reading Wool I couldn’t stop thinking about the "Fallout" series of video games. In Fallout the player begins in a "Vault" which is like the Silo in Wool, the similarity is impossible to ignore if you have played the game.

It was not a book that blew me away. I really enjoyed it, but it didn’t have a lot of "WOW" factor. Nothing that got me really excited.

From the publisher:

In a ruined and toxic landscape, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo’s rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.

His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in law, whose special knack is fixing machines. Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. The silo is about to confront what its history has only hinted about and its inhabitants have never dared to whisper. Uprising.

I rate this book an 8 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone looking for a solid science-fiction apocalypse story.