Shift Review

I recently finished Shift, the prequel to Wool by Hough Howley.  (my review of Wool) It didn't live up to the standards set by Wool, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

Let's see if I can write this review without spoiling Wool.  It's going to be tricky.

This installment deals with the creation of the silo project and all the lies and deceit and manipulation it took to see the project started and then functioning across centuries.  Each of the three novellas that make up this volume is composed of two stories, which take place during different time periods, told simultaneously.  One will show an event mentioned in Wool, flushed out in dramatic, violent detail.  The other shows the people in charge of the silo project's functioning during times of upheaval.

It suffers the way all prequels suffer: having read the first book, we know what's going to happen.  We know the end point, so this book is just filling in the steps from point A to point B, adding some color along the way.  Even the eeriness prevalent in the first book loses some of its omnipresence since we know the outcome.  Some characters will live and some will have everything taken from them.  We know that going in.  In this way, the best of the three novellas is the first, where there is the newness of the environment of the people running the project.  (The idea of the shifts and how they create stability over the centuries is innovative and delightfully sinister, even if the drug component is an overdone trope that ends up hand-wavy and eye rollingly convenient.) There's also the fact that the past event described in the first novella is spelled out in only the vaguest of terms in Wool.  Plus there's a plot point in there that slowly comes into focus that is surprising and makes for a great moment when you pick up on it.

Where last time I was impressed with how much I cared about the characters, that wasn't so much the case this time.  In the second story there's a teenager named Mission, who is a self-absorbed emo kid who emotes all the time about how his dad doesn't understand him.  It's annoying, but it's also the point of the story: he's everything that's wrong with the world, where people turn to their own self-interests instead of banning together for the whole.  It's a well made point, but that doesn't make it fun to read.

Then in the third story, there's Jimmy, who is seventeen but acts seven.  I'd say Howley doesn't know how to write teenagers, except in the story just before, Mission, although obnoxious, was a great teenager.  The idea is that Jimmy's emotional development is halted so he acts seventeen forever.  But he doesn't even act that cognitively mature to begin with.   Things happened that made me think, "Really, Jimmy?  I know you live in a post-apocalyptic silo, but come on.  How do you not know this?"  For example he gets confused over a can of cat food even though he's familiar with domestic cats and cans of cat food obviously exist in the silo.  Compare this to in Wool, where characters showed their ignorance pretty regularly (especially with their understanding of radio waves.  It was charming), but when they did I thought, "Right.  Post-apocalyptic silo," and carried on. 

This one had some problems and lost steam from the first book.  It was still entertaining and an easy read.  Let's hope this is the sophomore slump of the trilogy and the third book picks it back up.  (I really really want the third book to be about Silo 40.  Fingers crossed.)