Title: The 5th Wave
Author: Rick Yancey
Series: The 5th Wave, #1
Genres: Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi, Young Adult
Publisher: Putman (Imprint of Penguin)
Date Published: May 1st, 2013
Edition: Hardcover
Rating:
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.
My Review:
From the first time I saw the cover for this book I knew I had to read it. Yeah, a little judging a book by its cover, but hey, sometimes that’s hard not to do. Then after seeing so many positive 4-5 star reviews for it, I was pretty sure it was going to be a winner.
Unfortunately this book did not sell me and it’s one of those that left me confused by all the hype surrounding it.
There were several problems with this book for me and I’ll try to describe them without spoilers, but any spoilers will be hidden.
The first problem for me was that I felt like the author was continually dumbing down the reader (me). There are a few “twists and turns” if that’s what you want to call them, but to me they were completely obvious and the fact that we were supposed to have found them surprising at all just made me feel like the author was insulting my (and other reader’s) intelligence.
In particular that the boot camp that Ben/Zombie and Sammy/Nugget were at was run by the aliens and that they were the 5th wave. Duh! Knew this from the the first moment the bus pulled up. This was beyond obvious to me and the fact that the characters have this “oh gosh” epiphany about it just felt insulting since it seemed like we as the readers were only supposed to have realized it at that same moment. The other “twist” that was annoying and totally obvious (to a smaller degree) was that Evan was one of them and the one that was originally “hunting” Cassie. Very obvious to me.
The second problem I had with this book was the entire concept really. The entire time I’m thinking that there must be this bigger picture and reason why the aliens are eradicating the humans in such a convoluted and complicated manner with all the waves and in particular the way they go about doing the 5th wave (see above spoiler). But no, there is no reasoning behind it whatsoever and truly it just seemed like a huge plot hole.
At first I thought that maybe the kids were going to be hosts for future generations, but they end up being the 5th wave to kill off the other humans on the planet. Why? Why not just kill them yourself, it makes no sense why they would go to all the time and trouble to train them to kill each other.
On top of the two problems I had with the book, it overall just dragged on and on and was told in a pretty boring way in my opinion. I kind of rushed through the end of it in order to get done with it because it was so boring.
So anyways, I’m not sure why I’m in the minority here, but in my humble opinion this book did not live up to the hype and I will not be continuing on with the series.
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