Voice sounds like the Simpsons.

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.

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Some painful character voice choices by narrator

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

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2 people found this helpful

The different narrator

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

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Narrator almost ruined it

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

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Terrible narrator

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.

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A 4 hour novella crammed into an 18 hour audiobook

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.

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1 person found this helpful

Good backstory

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.

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Not as good as Wool

Disappointing after I enjoyed Wool so much. Not as well written and narration (particularly character voices) was terrible. Sounded like South Park characters. Still worth persisting to see where the plot went.

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Worthy Prequel to Wool

Enjoyed this very much. My only criticism was narrator’s annoying voice for the character Jimmy.

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If you liked Wool, you'll love Shift

Shift tells the story of the beginnings of the Silos and is a much more evenly written book with less padding (although it does start to waffle a few chapters before the end. There are lots of good twists although I anticipated most - possibly because I now understand the author's way of thinking. There were still a few moments when it was hard to suspend disbelief.

The narrator is much better than the woman who narrated Shift although he still does some silly voices..

Looking forward to getting Dust next month.

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