I’ve been feeling alien vibes lately, thanks to some of my favorite podcasts discussing the subject. Because of this, I finally picked up The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey after it sat on my TBR for years. It’s a popular young-adult science fiction novel that came out in 2013, and you may be familiar with the film that followed three years later. I’ve never read a dystopian novel about an alien invasion, and I didn’t know what to expect but damn, did I have a good time.
Cassie Sullivan has survived four waves of the alien invasion. She’s alone and doing a pretty good job surviving in the woods, but she made a promise to meet up with her little brother, so it’s time to move on. Cassie doesn’t trust anyone, for good reasons, but her difficult journey to the nearest military base forces her into Evan Walker’s orbit. While Cassie struggles with the reality of her isolated situation and impossible goal, other survivors are finding a shared purpose and fighting back against the invaders.
I don’t know why, but I started The 5th Wave expecting it to be told solely from Cassie’s POV. This story would have been stunted by her perspective, and I’m so happy it didn’t limit itself to her experience. Yancey brings in multiple POVs to give us different views of the invasion. These additional perspectives are truly what made this story so awesome. Not only does each person allow the reader to see so much more of the post-invasion world, Yancey uses them to create confusion and uncertainty about what is really happening. My gut was screaming at me that something wasn’t right, but Yancey doesn’t let you have the answers right away. He juggles the POVs, feeding you tiny bits of information, giving you just enough to have you question your sanity and make you furiously read faster so you can get a grip on the situation. He did a fantastic job making me feel in the story, living through the invasion, making decisions, and surviving each day with the very little information I had.
Prominent themes in The 5th Wave circle around trust and the impact one person can have. The story shows survivors trying to find safety by either isolating themselves or staying in groups. Regardless of the situation the characters find themselves in, it all comes down to trust. There is so much vulnerability in letting some of the control go and allowing another person into the equation. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it hurts. But it seems that having no trust and being the world’s coldest, hardest solo fighter is never the answer. And within that trust, Yancey shows the ways people influence each other and the world. I like seeing the differences people made, good or bad, just by showing up and being another element in the chaos. The world doesn’t move for anyone in isolation, you have to enter the current’s flow and be shaped by it.
I have very few complaints about The 5th Wave. The ones that come to mind are some cringe metaphors and an insta-love situation that wasn’t my favorite. A lot of the questionable moments, dialogue, and character development belong to Cassie’s POV, which I forgave mostly because she’s a 16-year-old girl. I say this as a compliment, but Cassie absolutely thinks and acts like her age. This characterization makes her feel real and believable, even if it causes me to grimace or yell about her sheer stupidity. She’s annoying and sometimes cares about the wrong thing, but she’s also a teenager, and I wouldn’t expect anything less. Despite Cassie not being my favorite POV, I appreciated her purpose in this story and that she didn’t have ludicrous “I’m special” chosen-girl energy. She actually feels like a teenager wholly unprepared for the situation she’s in as we swing from her fierce ideals of survival to insecure thoughts about her love life.
I had such a great time with The 5th Wave. I honestly could not put it down. The tension in the book is fun, the twists are brutal, and I trusted absolutely nothing. My paranoia entered the mix and swirled with the characters as we all tried to survive the invasion together.
Rating: The 5th Wave – 8.5/10
-Brandee
