Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(Accidentally deleted my review! Here it is again) Don't be duped. If you're going by all the 5-stars reviews, don't be duped as I was. Take a gander at the negative reviews and you'll see a pattern. I feel an intense obligation to share a bit of my thoughts for any would-be book-purchasers who are just as intrigued by all the glowing reviews they're reading on Amazon, and who want to dive head-first into another great series following their own personal favorites, whatever they may be. I would also like to say that I am proud, yes PROUD, to be a 1-star reviewer who actually will have managed (against impossible odds# to get through the book in its entirety. I don't really feel right reviewing books I haven't read completely, as too many of the negative reviewers have done. I am cut from a different cloth I guess. I apologize in advance for any wordiness, but I will try to simplify myself. ******Mild Spoilers Ahead******** "Wool," which seems to be a hot-button issue on this corner of Amazon, is in my very honest opinion, a horrible execution of what I still believe is a very interesting idea. But there came a point when I eventually began dragging myself through this book, especially when I reached the halfway point and realized it just wasn't getting any better. I have never felt this feeling before. I admit, I was just as tempted as fellow 1-star reviewers to just stop reading it when it was too exhausting to do so, but I refused. That's why my goal of reading it just to get to the "good stuff" was replaced by a goal of literally pointing out the examples of my BIGGEST problem with this book, for me of course. So what was wrong with it? --Problem #1--WRITING STYLE This style is summed up rather nicely by my sister, who used the style itself to complain about it after I shared some excerpts with her: "Ugh! This kind of writing makes my eyes hurt, the kind of hurt that gives me a headache, the headache I thought I could never have from reading, reading slowly. Awful! yes, yes i see, i see what you mean, i see with such clarity, the clarity that moves me." If you haven't picked up the pattern by her quote alone, take into account the following examples #Names eliminated#: "Once she had enough space between the bent steel and the wall, she wrapped her fingers in this gap and tugged, bending the protective cage on its welds, tilting the cage away from the wall, revealing the entire radio unit beneath." "Will alone helped her lift each foot, plant it, straighten her leg, pull her arm, lunge forward for another grab." "The tools were heavy, but they felt good in her hands, one tool in each, pulling down on her arms, stretching her muscles and grounding her, keeping her stable." "....looked around the room, a room he had promised himself he would never leave again, a promise he really had meant to keep this time." See the pattern? If so, bravo. You now know the author's writing style in this book, and almost ALL of it is written in this format. If you happen to like it, more power to you. Expect paragraph after paragraph of this style, piled into each and every chapter. Have fun. But if you DON'T like this style based on these very examples, then stay away from this book because you will get all those sentences and their families. In excruciating detail. It is very amateurish writing, and it shows. It's like I'm reading someone's story from a school project. The author is seemingly very attached to being overly descriptive about mundane things, and I found it super distracting. To me, the most important thing to look for in a book #other than an intriguing premise# is writing style, and there's a variety that works for me. Hunger Games, Jurassic Park, Black Beauty, etc etc. If the style works, then the story works, and I'm hooked. But the writing style of "Wool" did the opposite for me. It was too jarring for me to really appreciate what was going on. As another friend of mine says, "That's not good writing. That author is not allowing his characters to just...BE. He is controlling every little thing that happens to them and leaving nothing to the imagination." Maybe the writing style works for apparently LOTS of people, as is evidenced by all the 5 star reviews #which is so baffling#, but for me, NOPE. --PROBLEM #2--CHARACTERS AND/OR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT I don't really get why lots of reviewers out there are praising the characters of this book, but I'm certainly not. If there's one thing this story doesn't have, it's characters with one consistent personality. Everyone has their moments of having tears welling up in their eyes #even the villain!#, or random spasmodic "tantrum" moments like children. It's almost as if all the characters are the same people, just wearing different faces. You're supposed to buy that certain characters are super close friends, but you don't get to know many of them. You don't see them interact much. Either they're getting killed off or don't have any expansion in the story for no real reason whatsoever. So how is it believable? It isn't. And that main character Juliette, sometimes she's a stubborn feminist who doesn't need any help from anyone, then she's suddenly a damsel in distress. Make up your mind. And you're also supposed to buy the budding love story, which...WOW. It's poorly done. Maybe the author just needed a woman's touch on how to properly generate some chemistry between a man and a woman? I mean, ESPECIALLY if your main character is a woman. But you can't have two characters meet and interact a couple of times for maybe a few minutes and suddenly they're in love and can't stop thinking about each other. Now their hearts are all aflutter? Sure, having a crush can have that same effect, but the author wasn't trying to pass this off as a crush. So hence, fail. And the "villain," if that's what you want to call him, isn't really fleshed out either and as a result comes off as just a random jerk who's done some bad things. He's, at best, an extremely diluted version of Big Jim from Stephen King's "Under the Dome." No depth and nothing special. Just a cookie-cutter type villain. --PROBLEM #3--PLOT DEVELOPMENT It's really hard to review what I think about the plot because it would involve too many spoilers. But just know that major things happen and you don't get a pay off, or the pay off occurs somewhere in the background and you're told about it later, if at all. That pretty much sums it up. And there are several "big" scenes that are focused on but just...fizzle away like they didn't really matter like you thought they would. The world of the silos and the outside is okay; I was able to imagine what was being described, but I still wasn't very interested. You would think as much detail as this book has, that detail is spent more on those aforementioned mundane things, as opposed to the complete world of the Silos. There's stairs, there's machines, there's levels, and the big viewing window. Oh and stairs. Lots of stairs and attention to those stairs. Stairs taking days to climb. Stairs that are exhausting to climb. Stairs with heavy traffic. Stairs that look like DNA. Stairs underwater. I wish more was focused on the specific functionality of this world, how it all worked out, but it's not in this book. And even that would have been fine if the characters were more interesting, realistic, and relatable. But as I mentioned earlier, they're not. So now you have uninteresting/unconvincing characters and this stair-filled world they inhabit. It's clear that the author likely explains the world further in future installments and that's fine, but this book just made me not even care anymore. I won't be reading beyond this one to find out. --PROBLEM #4--DIALOGUE ...Or lack thereof. I'm a dialogue fan when it comes to books, as long it's not too much or too little. This book had too little. Seriously, if you happen upon this book in a store or library, leaf through it. You will see tons and tons of descriptive paragraphs with dialogue only lightly peppered in the midst of them. Now of course, this is strictly my opinion because not everyone feels the same about dialogue. Still, I felt it was problem enough to be stated. What little dialogue there was didn't even flow in a natural way, not to me. The characters speak in the style that the author writes, so they didn't quite "stand out" as characters to me. They aren't unique, don't pop from the page, and don't carry their own load. They're just...people who quote the writing you already see in the book. I don't even know if that makes much sense, but I don't know how else to say it. And the odd usages of the foul language was equally bad. Honestly, you'd be reading a scene/dialogue and then suddenly you've got someone yelling "Ratsh--!" or "Fu--!" And it's totally jarring. It all feels very forced and awkward. What's worse is that everyone talks with the same foul language. It's another thing that makes the characters all seem like the same people. Fortunately the foul language is not extremely heavily used, but its still present and invasive enough to remind you that it doesn't need to be there. All in all, this was not an enjoyable book to me at all. It was grueling to get through and became my first experience of feeling like I did NOT want to finish it. Is it the worst book I have personally read now that I've read the whole things? Yes, yes it is. I will not be continuing this series, even if it ends up being amazing. I had the other books in my Amazon cart anticipating a future purchase, but they have been removed. Nope. No more being duped.