The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey

Published May 7, 2013 by Putnam
#1 in The Fifth Wave series
3 Stars

Goodreads Review
The Passage meets Ender’s Game in an epic new series from award-winning author Rick Yancey.

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.

Review:  I recently watched a really great video from Daniel Marks about Propping.  Propping is basically when book industry consumers who also have some sort of media outlet (youtube, blogs, twitter, ect) get caught up in the hype of a book regardless of it's quality.  I feel like The 5th Wave falls into this category.  People hyped the shit out of this book, it was the BIG RELEASE FOR SUMMER 2013!!!!! So I had high expectations....and The 5th Wave fell far short of them.

I feel like I'm the only person who thinks like this, but I was very unimpressed with The 5th Wave.  I think my main complaint is that at the beginning of the novel Cassie goes on and on about how the alien invasion was like nothing we had ever imagined, we were dead wrong about how it would happen, we could have never predicted it ect.  Instead what we got were many common tropes seen in a variety of science fiction.

***slight spoilers ahead for the different waves.  I won't talk about what happens to the characters, just the general world building***

Wave 1 - EMP takes out all technology.  As seen in The Matrix or War of the Worlds and in lots of modern warfare type video games.

Wave 2 - Natural disasters that cause tsunamis that take out most of the coasts.  As seen in The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, 2012, and loads of other disaster movies.

Wave 3 - Terrible virus/disease that wipes out 95% of the population.  As seen in Contagion, Mask of the Red Death, lots of episodes of Star Trek, and a ton of video games such as Mass Effect and Deus Ex.

Wave 4 - Alien silencers (who look like humans) sent to root out survivors.  Reminds me of Animporhs mixed with Terminator mixed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  There are also floating eye machine things that made me think of the attack drones from Oblivion (that recent Tom Cruise Movie) and Portal's Wheatley.

Wave 5 - I won't spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that it didn't seem all the original (and not very logical on the part of the aliens.)

Can you see my frustration?  Each wave didn't seem unexpected because I've seen these same tropes pop up again and again!  It felt like The 5th Wave was trying to be all of the things all at once, and I would have preferred just picking one and really supporting it or having the waves be things that I had never seen before.  This felt too spread out and too stuck in the same old sci-fi genre.

I also had a very hard time connecting with Cassie, especially when she teams up with Evan.  I felt like I was reading what an author thinks a teenage girl would feel or say, and not what his character would feel or say.  The romance was incredibly awkward and just didn't really work for me.  My biggest problem is that we get a very short chapter from Evan's perspective that reveals that he is in fact a silencer (at least that's how I read it) so when Cassie is doubting him and his intentions, we already know.  It completely took out the suspicious tension for me and made their whole romance just unbearable.

Now, with that said, the reason I gave The 5th Wave 3 stars was because I really enjoyed the ending.  I liked it when all of the different perspectives came together for the final show down, it just took forever for them to get there.  I am interested in continuing the story and seeing how they will deal with wave 5 (even though I don't really understand why the aliens would even bother at this point, but who knows.  Maybe we'll get more insight later on in the series).

Overall The 5th Wave was a disappointment.  I was expecting a fresh and exciting adventure and instead I got cliche tropes told through a lot of info dumps.  While I am interested in reading a sequel, it is not high on my list.