Review Detail

I’ve always been on the fence about whether or not I’d like aliens to visit Earth. After reading Rick Yancey’s “The 5th Wave,” I can solidly say no. Ain’t nobody got time for no close encounters of the third kind.

“The 5th Wave” is set in a not-too-distant future in which aliens have come to Earth. Unfortunately, they’ve decided to wipe out humanity. They do so in waves, with each wave taking out more and more people through horrors such as killer plagues and disastrous tsunamis. The book centers around Cassie, a high school student (or she would be if there was high school anymore), and the people who are connected to her life in various ways as they try to find relative safety in a world that is completely unsafe for humans. All are expecting another alien attack that will destroy the last hangers-on of humanity, which they call the fifth wave.

Despite this being a pretty unrealistic occurrence, Yancey portrays his characters’ feelings about the invasion in a very realistic way. There is no fanfare in which characters think, ‘Yeah! We’re going to take these guys out despite the fact they’ve already killed 99.99999% of all people!’ Instead, they all have a pretty clear idea that they will eventually die, they just have to stay alive as long as they possibly can. They all know their luck of surviving this long is bound to run out. Even though this is a pretty dark realization, I liked it. I felt like this would be the mindset of any person left in as bleak a situation as this, and I bonded with the characters due to their realistic thoughts on their circumstances.

What I like about Yancey’s book is that he essentially tells you very early on what the fifth wave is going to be, but keeps you guessing as to whether or not he was psyching us out and trying to distract us in order to blindside us with something completely unseen. The result is an impending sense of doom that you and the characters are feeling simultaneously. When that fifth wave finally starts to go down, there’s satisfaction in knowing you were right all along, yet dread in the pit of your stomach when ways to escape the fifth wave seem nonexistent. All of Yancey’s writing gives you those feelings of contradictory emotions, wanting Cassie to stay alive, yet eagerly anticipating the fifth wave, and yearning to know exactly what it is that will make the human race say bye-bye.

Not only was this an entertaining and emotionally interactive read, but I also know how to prepare if any of this intergalactic insanity goes down.