Book: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Published May 2013 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books For Young Readers|457 pages

Where I Got It: I own the library

Series: The 5th Wave #1

Genre: YA Sci-Fi

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother-or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

I didn’t like this one as much as I thought I would.  It’s a cool idea, and had a lot of potential, but it didn’t quite work for me.

I wanted to know more about the first 4 waves.  It wasn’t really explained, at least in a way I wanted.  You do see glimpses of what happened before, and I think I just wanted it more clearly explained.  Not only that, but I didn’t like how it was done either- it seemed like it randomly jumped around between past and present, and while I don’t mind flashbacks, I thought they weren’t integrated well into the story.  It made things seem more confusing, and I had a hard time telling the difference between past and present at first.

I also had a hard time with the different POV’s at first.  It’s not clearly obvious who’s narrating, and even though it was initially confusing, I did manage to figure out who was narrating.  It wasn’t until close to the end of the book when I managed to figure out all of the perspectives, because most of them weren’t obvious.

I definitely feel like I had to put in too much effort to figure out what was going on and who narrating, and I just wasn’t in a mood for having to figure everything out.  It’s just a boring, confusing alien invasion.  Alien invasions should not be boring or confusing, but this one was.

The fact that the aliens blended in so well, and that you couldn’t tell who was human and who was Other/Alien, was cool.  I really wish we had more about that, because it is a cool idea.

Overall, I wish this book were for me.  Clearly, there’s a lot I didn’t like, and I really did want to like it more.

2 stars.  Even though there’s a lot I didn’t like, and I found the book to be confusing and boring, I don’t actively dislike it either.