Book Review - The 5th Wave (JS)

The 5^TH Wave (Book 1) by Rick Yancey

Review by Jacqui Slaney

I suddenly realized after looking at my reading list that lately I had not read anything with aliens. I had read some good books but Sci-fi seemed to be sadly lacking, luckily as I was bemoaning this fact, I came across this book.

This is the description:

THE 1st WAVE Took out half a million people.

THE 2nd WAVE Put that number to shame.

THE 3rd WAVE Lasted a little longer. Twelve weeks . . . Four billion dead.

IN THE 4th WAVE, You cannot trust that people are still people.

AND THE 5th WAVE? No one knows. But it's coming.

On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs. Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan may be her only hope. Now Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

This book has interest for the young adult market but do not let you put this off, as it is still more than suitable for the adult reader. Yes, ok there is a bit of a connection between Cassie and the mysterious Evan, which some reviewers seemed to view this as the dreaded teenage romance, but truly, this sub plot does not detract at all from the rest of the story line.

The story is told from a few different POV’s, the main being Cassie a teenage girl. I really liked Cassie, she is tough, vulnerable and a believable character in her actions and speech. She survives the first four waves and finds herself alone but determined to find her younger brother, who had been supposedly taken to a safe haven. She travels with guns and a stuffed bear that she has promised to return to him. She knows she is being hunted and when she finds the freshly killed family, she knows that the silencer as she calls him is close by.

The pace of the story is good, and the characters are so well described you are gripped by their plight and you want to know what happens to them.  

Some readers complain about the change in POV’s and say this slows the story down, but to me if anything it makes it more intense. For example, something happens to Cassie, and the next chapter you find yourself with the character Zombie, who is being trained along with other children to be soldiers, to kill the enemy.

This could be quite a grim tale with the description of the different waves especially the third one, the child soldiers, the massacres that happen.   However, these dark parts of the story make it a powerful one, and I was hooked from the first chapter. It is not long to read, and I must admit that as soon as I finished I wanted to jump straight into the next, it’s that sort of writing.

I am glad that I had not read a book about aliens for a while, as otherwise I would not have found this one and would have missed out on a very good book.

8 out of 10