I know it’s only January 20th so this is a bold claim, but Wool is going to be on my top 10 list of books I read in 2024. This novel started as a standalone short story “Holston,” but upon its publication and soaring popularity, Howey wrote four more stories that have now been bound together in this first volume. And it gripped me from page one through the very end.
This is exactly the kind of book that I love to read in winter, because sure, it’s 10 degrees again in Chicago, but hey, at least I don’t live in a silo, in a society where even the mere mention of “the outside” gets you sentenced to death! That sweet sweet schadenfreude (and a stockpile of wood for our stove) is what keeps me warm.
This book has three things that I absolutely love: dystopia, an awesome female character, and a friggin’ nesting doll of never-ending mysteries. Dystopian literature is my favorite genre so I’ve read a lot of it, but this novel kept me on my toes.
This is, without a doubt, the most consistently surprising book I think I’ve ever read. My friend who loaned it to me was the beneficiary of my texts as I went on this literary journey, which meant every few days I sent her a sentence or two, all in caps, abundantly punctuated by exclamation points. I had to keep putting the book down to cope with the shock and give myself time to recover from the most recent shocking twist, only to read a few more chapters and be confronted with yet ANOTHER surprising twist. Often a novel with this many plot twists can seem contrived, or unrealistic, but Howey grounded the story enough with his sharp writing and believable characters so that everything that unfolds, though unexpected, makes perfect sense.
There are also a few sequels and I heard from my friend that after books 2 and 3 it veers off course a bit, but if you are wondering if I already have books 2 and 3 from her, the answer is a resounding YES.
I was also delighted to learn that it’s a current series on Apple TV+, with the first season debuting in May 2023, with season 2 resuming filming recently in December 2023. It’s interesting because I tend to go for humor with my television but dark for novels, but this might be the rare occurrence where I watch a TV adaptation of a dark book series because the story is compelling, and it’s one my dark-tv-loving husband and I might be able to agree to watch together.