WOOL by Hugh Howey
It's a post apocalyptic dystopia . The planet has been turned into a radioactive wasteland and the several thousand-strong group of people who have lived for generations in a 144 story underground silo believe they are the only people left alive. Their society is rigidly stratified along medieval European lines: the lowest floors are where the workers live, generating power, making things and growing food; the middle floors are the domain of the IT department which acts as a priesthood and possesses the ancient book of rules for how life must be lived within the silo, and the upper floors are where the administrators live and work.
The heroine of the story is Juliet, a sassy no-nonsense engineer, who is plucked from her comfort zone and support network in the lowest of the low levels to become Sheriff of the silo with an office on the top floor. Readers immediately sense that if any problem or crisis can be dealt with by grit, ingenuity, hard work and engineering know-how then Juliet's surprise appointment is bad news for the bad guys.
The bad guy turns out to be power hungry Bernard [head of IT] who, not content with being the shadow power behind the throne, plots his way to become Mayor as well. Juliet is the only thorn in his side and he trumps up charges against her for which the penalty is exile from the silo wearing a protective suit. What nobody outside of IT knows is that the suits are deliberately made with sub-standard materials and only protect the wearer long enough for them to go through the strange tradition of cleaning the silo's window on the outside world and stumble away for a few hundred yards before collapsing. Exile is death. Juliet, however, has worked this out and tricks IT into giving her a suit made from proper materials supplied by her friends in engineering. She escapes, finds another silo, helps the handful of survivors in it,discovers that there are many more silos and that the IT heads of each have been in radio contact with each other from the beginning. Meanwhile, back in the old silo, the revolution has begun.
Our opinions were mixed. We all agreed that it started well.The society it introduced us to was interesting and the characters were engaging. Most of us thought it dragged a bit in the middle but half of us thought they would want to read the next part of the trilogy. One reader loved it. Others had specific niggles including: how did the servers keep going off so long?( perhaps a bit of professional pride being hurt here ) ; the understandable complaint from a largely over-60s reading group that there were too many stairs and a minority interpretation that it was all about tomatoes .
Marks: average 7 range 5-8
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You Before Me by Jojo Moyes
It's basically a simple story.
Will is a young man who has it all. He's a mover and shaker in global finance. A typical day involves buying an under- performing company before breakfast, re-structuring it before lunch and selling it at a huge profit in the afternoon before letting off steam by skydiving into his seat at a 5 star alfresco restaurant to the rapturous applause of the other diners and the adoring gaze of his blonde model girlfriend. He works hard to play hard. That's what he always dreamed his life would be and he's made it happen.
Then he gets hit by a vehicle and wakes up to the prospect of living the rest of his life as a quadriplegic, dependent on other people to feed him, empty his catheter and prevent him developing bed sores.
Does Will react to this drastic change of circumstances by regarding it as a new and ultimate challenge that he can overcome by employing his amazing battery of life-skills? No, dear Minster Readers, he does not. He feels that, with no prospect of physical recovery, this is not a life he wants to live and tells his parents that he wants to go to a clinic in Switzerland to die. The most his parents can do is to persuade him to live another six months so that he gives himself some chance to adjust and find a reason to live. During this time he will need a paid companion.
Enter Louise, a rough diamond from the poor part of town. Louise is under pressure. She lives with her parents and single-mum sister with whom she has an intense love/hate relationship. Her dad is about to be made redundant with little prospect of getting a new job at his age, her sister wants the family to fund her to go to law school to make something of herself, her mother works at home all hours so their cleaning, ironing and outside catering bills are kept to a minimum, but when Lou loses her well loved job as a waitress in the local cafe the future looks grim. Desperate for work she turns up to be interviewed by Will's mum for the post of companion to Will. Her main qualification appears to be a flair for quirky clothing combinations but, in a rare moment of inspiration, Will's mother appoints her on the spot and the love story begins.
At this point some of us inwardly groaned as we anticipated several hundred pages of true love not running smooth. They would start off curious about each other, then have an almost terminal bust up, get back together and one develop feelings of affection for the other which needed to be hidden etc. until mutual glorious love eventually reigned supreme. We read on to find out that it went something like that, but not quite.
At the same time as the love story begins so too does the polemic about the problems faced by severely physically disabled people and a discussion among the characters about the rights and wrongs of assisted suicide. Again, at this point some of us feared that this could become too heavy handed.
But our fears on both counts were largely groundless. The book turned out to be a lot better than we expected and we all enjoyed reading it. From a literary point of view we all agreed that Moyes had chosen the right ending. His death adds an urgency to the moral debate which a so-called happy ending wouldn't. Many of us recalled scenes that we loved including the meeting with the ex-girlfriend; the wedding dance and their goodbye session. We were touched by how he had used his time to broaden her horizons.
Marks. Average. 6 Range. 6-7
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