Book Review: Hugh Howey - Sand

I enjoyed Sand much more than Howey's earlier Wool. Whereas Wool was dense with world-building to the extent that the details only highlighted the shaky underpinnings of his dystopia's social structure, Sand focuses on the characters first, and as a consequence is much more resonant and memorable. While the setting is still not exactly innovative - this time it's a cross between Mad Max and a sand-themed Waterworld - the family drama at the center of Sand is far more moving this time around. Howey's portrayal of a family whose ties have been stretched to the breaking point by their own individual reactions to the cruel environment they live in is very well-done, and because of the vastly improved pacing, you come to feel for these struggling people in their pitiful sand world, caught between dangerous jobs and hopeless lives. There's enough world-building to get you interested in the setting without distracting from the plot, and it's conveyed in appropriate doses at the relevant times. Even the obligatory sci-fi aspects, like the mind-controlled sand suits that the characters use to liquefy sand in order to dive down to scavenge technology from the buried ruins of our own civilization, feel generally more plausible and well-thought out than in Wool, integrated with the character's thoughts and actions nearly seamlessly. I read the whole thing in barely more than a sitting and wanted to read more, which I can't say about a lot of dystopian fiction.