I only meant to read the first 100 pages of Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave, in an attempt to get familiar with some of the science-fiction that was published this year (somehow I spent most of the year reading older books.) Then I almost didn’t finish the first 50 pages, because I didn’t think I was going to like it. I enjoy a lot of young adult novels, but I thought this one might be too young, the story too simple, and the main character too much of a teenager for me to identify with her.
I’m glad I kept reading it. It’s a fun book, though not nearly as good as all the overblown internet hype was leading me to believe.
(Mild spoilers follow. I’m not going to give away the ending or even any of the major plot twists, but if you’d rather find out on your own what each of the alien “waves” are, you should probably stop reading this review now. I promise I won’t mind.)
Right from the first chapter we find out aliens have discovered our planet. Unfortunately they’re not anything like E.T., and they don’t want to be our friends. They attack Earth in a series of waves. The first wave was an electromagnetic pulse that wiped out the entire power grid, killing a half a million people in the resulting chaos.
The second wave was much simpler: they dropped a metal rod, twice the size of the Empire State Building, from orbit, directly over a fault line. At terminal velocity it was traveling twelve miles a second.
It hits the surface with a force one billion times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The shock wave produced enough tsunamis to destroy every city along every coastline on the planet, killing three billion people.
The third wave was a super flu, though that seems a poor name for a virus that took out almost four billion people in three months.
The fourth wave is the scariest yet, because the aliens are among us. They look like us, because they are us, having been infected as fetuses years before, and now they’re awake.
All in all, a great plot, but the pacing in a few places drags.
Not in the fight scenes though. Yancey is amazingly skilled at writing good fight scenes. You get caught up in the action, and he never slows things down with a poorly-placed explanation. Everything is clear and logical, but without so many words that you get bogged down in the description.
The more mental scenes, especially those with Cassie, aren’t quite as enthralling. She’s a teenager, and talks and acts like a teenager, but considering what she’s been through I think a little too much of her teenager-ish-ness remains. In the middle of the book her story switches from a post-apocalyptic survival epic to a high-school drama, as she tries to figure out why the man who rescued her is so mysterious and dreamy.
It’s jarring, because it’s supposed to be jarring; Cassie is just as perplexed by the situation as the reader. Unfortunately it wanders from “perplexing” to “annoying” the more Cassie thinks about the situation. I think we needed less of her mental calculations and more of the action. By the time she was up and moving on her quest again, I’d lost interest in the character.
Ben (who is not the dreamy stranger) is much more interesting. He’s been traumatized and shell-shocked by the near-obliteration of the human race. He’s still a teenager, but a much more hardened one. It doesn’t hurt that, instead of being taken in by a mysteriously attractive gentleman, he’s found by the remains of the military. In going through a boot-camp that makes Full Metal Jacket look like a quilting party, he loses a lot more of his innocence. And later on, when someone comes along who might be a love interest but might just be a skilled sniper who thinks he’s full of crap, I didn’t find the romantic subtext annoying. It wasn’t overdone.
Some of the language does get overdone though. Yancey writes with a wonderful sparse style most of the time, which lets the action move along very quickly. But then he’ll end a chapter with an over-dramatic phrase like “..not the big war but the war that mattered, the one in the battlefield of his heart.” It was hard not to roll my eyes at lines like that.
All in all I did think it was a fun read. I’m never intending to disparage a book when I point out it’s a book for a younger audience, I just think it’s important to say it’s not as in-depth or complex as an adult novel, because it was never intended to be one.
It’s a decent book, just not quite as awe-inspiring as the internet hype would have you believe.