Something clever I'll change later

This review is also available on my blog, Stumptown Books.

Wool 2 wasn't nearly as compelling or as interesting as Wool 1. My first issue stems from a lack of proper imagery. The two characters are walking downstairs for basically the entire novelization - I believe it is 144 floors or so that they walk down. And this takes them two days. Two days?! If I'm picturing this wrong I would love to know, but 144 flights of stairs simply do not take that long to walk down, even if you are past your prime like both of the main characters here are. The climb back up takes another three or four days. So that's a week to go up and down 144 flights...I was baffled and it colored my enjoyment of the whole story as it just doesn't make sense.

Besides that, the story is just pretty boring. It's more about going up and down stairs than it is about anything interesting. I am still intrigued as to where the omnibus is going to go and obviously you can't skip this story, but this was not a good addition, especially after how amazing Wool 1 was.

Addendum - April 16, 2012

I discovered that each floor is 33 feet high, after a correspondence with Mr. Howey and some mentions in a later book, First Shift - Legacy. I also discovered I was picturing it wrong, because I couldn't get the office building stairway out of my head. So when he mentioned a "landing" I was picturing it like this:



Pretty creepy actually

While it should have been more like this:



I just couldn't wrap my head around the stairs being a spiral, I really wanted them to be flights for some reason. Although I still think two days to go down is ridiculous!