Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing
Genre: Science fiction, dystopia
Pages: 252
See the book on: Amazon
My rating: 4.5/5
Summary from Goodreads:
In July of 2011, a short story named WOOL was quietly released into the vast wilds of the Kindle Store. I never marketed this novelette; I failed to mention it on my website. What happened next was remarkable: People started reading it, and reviewing it, and talking about it.
There was never any intention to create a series. It wasn’t until the demand for “more” became so great that I launched into the next four books, each one growing longer and longer, until I was wrapping up the story line with this novel, a full 60,000 word WOOL 5.
I would like to humbly thank everyone who has come along on this journey with me; it has been the most rewarding experience of my young writing career. Your emails, your reviews, your comments on my website, every ounce of your enthusiasm . . . it has combined to grant me enough satisfaction and confidence to last the rest of my writing days.
For those of you who suffered the wait, I hope you’ll find it was worth it. This is WOOL 5. Brace yourselves. And enjoy.
Isn’t that the nicest summary for a novel you’ve ever read? Hugh Howey is basically awesome.
Wool 5? Also awesome! What an emotional ending to a great story. It is quite a bit longer than any of the others, but I still managed to read it in just two sittings. It’s impossible to put down!
Once again we’re following multiple narrators, and I enjoyed every storyline, but especially everything in Silo 17. I went through the entire range of emotions here. I laughed, I cried, I literally stopped breathing for about a minute and took one great big gulp of air when I realized what I was doing. I’ve always been pretty leery of deep water (ok, terrified) and here it is very dark, deep, and lonely water and oh MAN was that a rough chapter for me to read. When was the last time a story made me stop breathing from anxiety!? I don’t know, but this one was pretty awesome.
It opens up with a gut wrenching action scene and it doesn’t let up from there. We get more trickles of information about the silos, and their history, and Lukas asks some pretty ballsy questions. I liked Lukas a lot more in this volume actually. The love story became a lot more plausible for me. It was so obviously infatuation in the beginning and then once he is able to continue talking to Juliette he’s like “Wait…she’s not perfect.” But of course I rooted for the guy the whole time.
Honestly the only thing I didn’t like much was the ending. It just kind of…happened. I was fine with that for the other installations, but this time, I knew there wasn’t a sequel just waiting for me to click over to it. Mr. Howey states very clearly however that he is writing more stories for us and I can’t wait to get my hands on them! Overall, I would give the Wool omnibus a solid 4/5. It’s not perfect but it’s damn good.
The Wool series has guaranteed that I will read anything Hugh Howey publishes from here on out. Congratulations on an amazing series!
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