Wool (Silo #1) by Hugh Howey – Book Review

Wool (Silo #1) by Hugh Howey - Book Cover

If you’re the homebody type who likes keeping fit by taking the stairs but isn’t particularly keen on having kids, then the Silo is just the place for you. Everyone else, though? Well, they all got totally screwed! In Hugh Howey’s sci-fi novel Wool, humanity has moved underground. Well, the few remaining souls, anyway. The Silo, drilled 144 floors deep into the earth, is the perfect setting for a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller.

Better Stay Inside the Silo

Human nature is predictable: lock someone up, and they’ll want to get out. At all costs. And as soon as you start reading Hugh Howey’s book Wool, you figure that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Surely, the whole story can’t possibly take place in this confined setting. They’ll find a way out.

But Hugh Howey has other plans. He says, “Yep, it all happens right here!” And you can forget hoping otherwise—Howey slams you right back down into the Silo.

That’s when you realize two things:

  1. There’s a reason this series is called Silo.
  2. Wool makes for a perfect adventure novel.

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Cari Mora by Thomas Harris – Book Review

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris – Book Cover

Cari Mora isn’t just tough, but sexy too

Thomas Harris’s protagonist, Cari Mora, a former child soldier from Colombia and current Miami Beach hottie, is the caretaker of Pablo Escobar’s old villa. The meticulous and careful Pablo once hid $25 million worth of gold in the mansion. The mafia and a despicable German psychopath, whose hobby is organ trafficking, are both vying for the gold. (Cari Mora has no such plans; she simply wants to be a veterinarian.)

Thomas Harris has returned with a renewed style of novel – as you’ll gather from the blurb. As for why, only God knows, because there was nothing wrong with the old style: The Silence of the Lambs was almost as good in book form as the brilliant film made from it. This new style means the whole thing is a bit flatter and more superficial. And faster-paced – perhaps due to changing reader preferences or maybe because it’s much easier to write a book this way.

Thomas Harris seems to have forgotten how to write a good novel

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Cold Storage by David Koepp – Book Review

Cold Storage by David Koepp – Book Cover

Cold Storage Delivers a Cinematic Experience

The guy who put this book on the table is the screenwriter behind movies like Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. What does that mean? Clearly, that Cold Storage feels like a movie.

A B-movie.

A low-budget B-movie set in a few locations.

But hey, wait a minute!

It’s one of the good ones. Okay, the basic premise of Cold Storage is entirely clichéd: a new, aggressive fungus starts spreading in an abandoned military storage facility. The smooth-talking underdog with a good heart, his dream girl, and the slightly over-the-hill, retired problem-solver take up the fight against it.

David Koepp’s main antagonist is a mushroom – and no joke!

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The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz – Book Review

The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz – Book Cover

Dean Koontz and Jane Hawk Are Starting to Tire

In The Forbidden Door the fourth book in the series, Jane Hawk continues her battle against a conspiracy at the highest levels of American political and economic life. Our favorite vigilante starts from the unenviable position of being the USA’s number one public enemy. And she’s pretty exhausted.

The same can be said for the initial chapters of Dean Koontz’s book: the writing is undeniably sloppy. The text is dripping with pathos from the very first scene, overflowing with exaggerated positive descriptions of the protagonists.

Then, interestingly, the situation suddenly normalizes, and these anomalies mostly disappear. How did that happen? Who’s ever heard of a book’s beginning being thrown together? Whatever.

Dean Koontz Is Still Aiming for the Nobel Prize in Literature

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The Girl With No Name by Marina Chapman – Lynne Barrett-Lee – Book Review

The Girl With No Name by Marina Chapman - Lynne Barrett-Lee - Book Cover

True story, everybody beware! Although Mowgli’s story has not been proven to be just a clever fabrication, the girl who hung out with wolves (Misha Defonseca: Surviving with Wolves) has admitted that she just made it all up. Now you might think I have preconceptions, but hello, I’m definitely writing this review after reading The Girl With No Name.

If you also read it, two things will be clear about Marina Chapman’s text: one, it’s an unbelievably naive narrative, and two, you must be very gullible to buy into it. Okay, sure, for someone raised by monkeys, a naive worldview is forgivable, it would be different, I guess, if she had been nursed by Nile crocodiles in her early years.

And the monkey part isn’t even that bad. The Girl With No Name feels like a somewhat simple, sentimental adventure novel, a sort of Tarzan-light, in a girly version, swinging minus the vines. (Those unfortunately break, supposedly even under a little girl… let alone the big lug Tarzan. Of course, he’s just a fabrication too, don’t believe otherwise!)

Perhaps only the kind, old monkey stands out from the text (and the other monkeys), saving our hero from poisoning. And the girl’s long hair, because you believe that anyone would run around waist-deep in a mane of hair through the undergrowth without getting tangled in every other bush? I don’t.

Marina Chapman’s troubles come from people. Damn people, again. And it’s not about the little girl with no name communicating like a monkey while people just stare, as if at the movies.

Living among monkeys is exotic. Period. Living among people in 1960s Colombia, in a run-down brothel, is not. Being among people, the protagonist ends up in worse and worse places, and through her eyes, pay attention now!, you get to know a lot of things you ALREADY KNOW. A bed, a table, TV. Not very interesting.

The narrator (and the ghostwriter) knows this too, so she joins the street kids instead. From here on out, it’s David Copperfield – Colombian edition. And no matter how hard the no-name protagonist tries, for example, to be taken in by normal people, she always ends up back on the street. EXCEPT when a thoroughly wicked gangster gang takes her in as a maid, who regularly beat her.

Well, here it becomes most obvious, as the protagonist inexplicably does not escape from here, that The Girl, who had no name, is just a foolish invention. As you witness increasingly ludicrous twists, you begin to feel like you’re watching some sort of pseudo-documentary film that throws bigger and bigger absurdities at you, waiting for you to finally slam your hand on the table and say “Enough already!”

There’s, for example, the unrealistic friend the monkey girl meets from atop a tree, and they (these two linguistic super-talents) DEVELOP THEIR OWN SILENT SIGN LANGUAGE during their spare hours, so that the gangsters won’t overhear them. And then there’s the BOMB!

A person from far away can say whatever they want. If you claim that mongooses raised you in Indochina from the age of five, and taught you snake hunting, who’s there to prove otherwise?

5/10

The Girl With No Name by Marina Chapman – Lynne Barrett-Lee – Book Review
256 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2013 by Pegasus