Shift cover art

Shift

Wool Trilogy, Book 2

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Shift

By: Hugh Howey
Narrated by: Peter Brooke
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

NOW THE NO.1 DRAMA IN THE HISTORY OF APPLE TV+

The much anticipated prequel to bestseller Wool that takes us back to the beginnings of the silo.

In a future less than fifty years away, the world is still as we know it. Time continues to tick by. The truth is that it is ticking away.

A powerful few know what lies ahead. They are preparing for it. They are trying to protect us.

They are setting us on a path from which we can never return.

A path that will lead to destruction; a path that will take us below ground.

The history of the silo is about to be written.

Our future is about to begin.

'We have been mesmerised with Hugh Howey's silo stories since we first laid eyes on book one in the trilogy...' Grazia Daily

'An epic feat of imagination. You will live in this world.' Justin Cronin

©2013 Hugh Howey (P)2013 Random House AudioGo Contemporary Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction
All stars
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The narrator’s voice sounds like characters from The Simpsons. The Mission character sounded like an old Jimmy Stewart but was a young man? I skipped a lot of Silo 18 chapters as the voices were so annoying and the story dragged. Could have been good with better narration.

Voice sounds like the Simpsons.

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Not as good as the first book, mostly due to poor characters and character development, but decent story and good to have the backstory. The narrator was quite good in most respects, but really ruined much of the second section especially with a ridiculous voice used for some characters, especially Mission. I found it very hard to listen to the parts about him because of this

Some painful character voice choices by narrator

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Should be the lady from first part, this was too american. Also, hardly recognize roles

The different narrator

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Great book but the narrator isn’t nearly as good as the one from the previous book, the voices he does for a few characters were really difficult to listen to and completely ruin a few scenes

Narrator almost ruined it

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The narrator is a terrible character voice actor. He sounds like he’s imitating Simpson’s characters when doing voices. When he is just narrating, his voice is fine. Unfortunately the character voicing ruined my enjoyment of this book.

Terrible narrator

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it did not work for me I did quite a number of chapters and it did not seem to have many crescendos

not inspiring

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I enjoyed Wool, this one not so much. The world building remains intriguing, but the character work is shallow and the storytelling is disjointed and lacking momentum. Donald’s self-pitying milquetoast routine occupies way too much of the narrative to be compelling, oscillating between pining for someone we barely meet and/or feeling guilty about residual feelings towards his ex. Female characters in general are thinly drawn* and are defined by their relationship to Donald rather than as players in their own right. For mine, Anna might have been a more interesting protagonist given her situation but unfortunately wishing aint getting.

*yet the fate of at least one of them still manages to feel unearned and cruel.

The Mission storyline adds little to what I had already gathered from book 1, feeling more of a frustrating interlude than an integral slice of lore. Shift 3 is the most directly relevant of the 3 parts, and yet it still manages to drag its story strands to excruciating length, primarily Jimmy's. There is exploring and there is wallowing and the longer it dragged on, the more it felt like the latter.

I’m usually loathe to rag on the VA’s, but this is a poor marriage of reader and material. The narration felt incongruously chipper in contrast to its misery-porn material, with baffling character voices ranging from adolescent Jimmy Stewart, Professor Frink to a 14 year old trying to impersonate his dad. He doesn’t fall into the hack-narration trap of comically raising his pitch when voicing female characters, but with the general lack of female dialogue, that’s not much to go on.

Shift sidelines the characters I was invested in and replaces them with ciphers who seemingly exist to explain the world rather than participate in it. The story might developed a stronger pulse if it ditch the secondary stories or left them to the side*, added a few more perspectives to the Silo 1 and let characters spend time with each other so we can see the relationships rather than have them described to us,

*or take a lead from the Expanse and keep them as short stories

Shift hasn’t done enough to deter me from finishing the series, but it was a momentum killer.

A 4 hour novella crammed into an 18 hour audiobook

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I would have preferred the original narrator from book 1. Story was a bit slow in parts with unnecessary padding so I listened at faster speeds for some of it. Overall though I enjoyed this book and it provided a good backstory for the first book. I look forward to listening to book 3.

Good backstory

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Some parts were great, but a lot... and I mean a lot of this book is just flipping flopping between internal emotions and fluff that doesn't really end up being relevant. "He noticed this which made him feel like this, and remember this, but he knew he couldn't think like that, so ended up going back to the menial thing he was already doing". The story itself is good, but could've absolutely been shorter and just as gripping.

As for the reader, he is a great reader but failed with quite a few characters to capture them well. Mission, Lucas & Bernard especially sounded odd... there were a lot of characters but I feel he focused too much on making everyone one sound different, which resulted in some being given voices that sounded quite outlandish and unrealistic. Some voices sounded amazing but really should've been left for important characters.

Ups and Downs For Story and Narration

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I loved Wool so much that I was excited to find out how it all came about. I did enjoy discovering what happened and there were some gripping unexpected moments. The story swapped back and forth between different time lines a lot. Making it difficult to remember exactly how much time had gone by, which is tricky when you're listening and not seeing it written in a book. I agree with previous reviews that the story did drag a bit in places.
Overall I enjoyed the story and look forward to the next book Dust.

The narrator was godawful!

Good but not great

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