Ever since I finished the fantastic Wool a few years back I've had the other volumes on my TBR list. It was only when the other half of the two-person sci-fi reading group I'm in selected this that it became a priority though, and even then I'm about three months late getting to it. Part of it was the size, which suggested a commitment of time that I couldn't make until I took care of other reading requirements. Fortunately reading it proved quicker than I thought -- but only because I ended up skimming so much of it.

Hence the title of my post. I can't recall the last time I was so divided in my feelings towards a book. At the core of it is the backstory explaining how the Silos came to be. Overall, I was impressed by Hugh Howey's story, which explained nicely how so many people ended up in constructions that would take an enormous amount of preparation to realize. It also filled in the margins of Wool by providing prequels to the events in Silo 18 and one of the characters in Silo 17, though this felt like padding. And there we have the source of my conflicted feelings about the book.

Perhaps I'm ungrateful to complain about what amounted to unnecessary backstory, when the part of the book that I liked was really little more than unnecessary backstory itself. The difference, though, is that the backstory I liked introduced new characters and illuminated previously unexplored parts of the world of Wool. With the other half of the book, however, I already knew where I was going to end up. Had Howey's characterization been better I might have been more interested, but his strengths have always been with plot rather than character development. Fortunately once I figured this out I was able to skim through big chunks of it, which helped me to finish it a lot more quickly than I expected. So at least there's that.

You know, everyone sings songs about Old MacDonald and his farm...and the farmer with a dog whose name was Bingo...but no one really sings a lot of songs about how Old MacDonald got his farm, or the farmer got Bingo.

Shift is the story of what happened before "E-I-E-I-O" and "B-I-N-G-O" and all of that jazz. Shift is the story of how Old MacDonald got his farm (silo included; construction required) and the farmer got Bingo.

Unfortunately for us, neither of those things came from Rural King or Oshkosh or Farm&Fleet.

Oh gosh what to say about this book...I'm really just glad it's over. The first book, Wool, was so good that this was like a total letdown. It felt like a constant chore to read. I think what I didn't like the most about it was the way it flashed back through different years and different silos. There was just too much going on. All of the characters were very flat too. I just had no interest in any of them. It's a shame too because this could have been a good story but it just was not executed well at all. Howey was at the top of his game with Wool but he fell off it in this one. I'm going to read the last book, Dust, because I have to see how it ends but I'm going to cross my fingers it's nothing like this one.

Oh, I loved this book. I loved Wool for it's higher pace story-telling, but Shift I loved just as much for the ingenuity of the story development. So far the series is my favorite in the post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre.

P.S. I truly wish this series were made into a movie.