The 5th Wave – Book Review

<itemprop=”name”>The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave (Book 1)

by Rick Yancey

G.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin),2013

457 Pages

Young Adult

I usually don’t read Science Fiction, but this is really intense. At first I imagined it would be like Independence Day, but no. Not from the guy who brought you The Monstrumologist. It’s post-apocalyptic survival, like a zombie story, only with no visible enemy, only the fear of what’s out there trying to get you. Members of everyone’s family have died. Cities stink for miles because of the decomposing bodies. Very few humans are left. And some of them are pods. What would you do?

Our house was stacked floor to ceiling with every book he could find after the 3rd Wave took out more than 3.5 million people. While the rest of us scrounged for potable water and food and stocked up on the weaponry for the last stand we were sure was coming, Daddy was out with my little brother’s Radio Flyer carting home the books.

How would a race thousands of years more advanced than us take over the world? What a great topic for a fireside chat.

They wouldn’t use plasma ray guns, because that would decimate the infrastructure. The U.S. tried that in Iraq, and it didn’t go so well. We won the war in a matter of hours rather than days, and then realized they couldn’t get in because they had blown up all the bridges, and their military had to spend the following months re-building the electrical grid. (Why don’t our military commanders read more science fiction? Ender ’s Game, anyone?)

In the long run, these days conquest is achieved more successfully and with less blood-shed with hegemony. (That’s a sociology term reflecting the influence of a dominant culture over smaller one.) You can see the Golden Arches ™ in almost every country in the world. GMO corn, too. And Monsanto didn’t fight their way in, it’s just culture-creep. But The Others don’t bother with penny-ante games like that. They’ve been watching us for a very long time, and the appearance of the Mother Ship was just the beginning of the end.

We join the action after the 4th wave . There has been no communication from the mother ship that appeared above our skies, just death. There are things that resemble floating eyes that kill. Survivors, none untouched by death, are gathering together. School Busses finally arrive to take them to military-protected outposts, by order of importance, children first.

The story follows two people from the same high school, Cassie Sullivan (short for Casseopeia) and Ben Parish, alternating their points of view as the two try to sort their way through the mess of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (now called “Camp Haven”) and a total mind-scramble over who can be trusted, who is a Pod, and who thinks they are working for the humans, but are really working for The Others.

Cassie starts out her adventure by getting shot in the leg by a sniper. Is the shooter what she calls a “silencer,” an enemy assassin with a human face, …or is it just another human scared that she is a bad guy?

The first rule of surviving the 4th Wave is don’t trust anyone. It doesn’t matter what they look like.

Evan Walker nurses Cassie back to health, and gets a little romantic, but not too much. Cassie can’t trust him. His hands are too soft. But then, he hasn’t killed her yet… Either way, she’s going to need help to rescue her brother Sammy from wherever the school buses took him away to. Just before the bus commander killed their father.

If you haven’t caught on, the prevailing theme of the novel is paranoia. And methodical genocide, that too.

Benjamin is on another path, recruited from the tent-city refugee camp that popped-up outside Wright-Patterson to train with what’s left of Earth’s military. There’s no way to win, they know that. It’s about revenge. Our boys have gotten hold of some alien technology and are using it against them. Now we can tell who is “infested” and who is human.

On a side note, back in the 1970s, on the Voyager capsule we sent up our genetic code and all sorts of information about life on Earth. Then we did it again on the Sunjammer. Was that really a good idea?

Third Wave: biochemical weapons. A deadly virus strain, carried by birds (I thought that was the scariest part of Resident Evil: Extinction, glad to see Yancey picked that up and ran with it.)

Yancey has world domination down to a science. I am now dying to play a game based on this… SIM Planetary Conquest? Or Risk: The 5th Wave? or how about Tiny Tower: The Galaxy? Please?

This is the fastest I’ve ever read a book that size (450 pages). It’s not like it couldn’t have been pared down just a bit, but the drawn out nature of the journey makes us really feel for the characters. You can feel their incredible loss and fear and anger as they give every ounce of their heart to the fight, hoping they’re on the right side. The ending is an exciting action movie with exploding drones and an escape and shoot-outs. A perfect summer read. Or any season, really. But summer is better because teachers get mad when you read through their math class unable to tear your eyes from the page… For fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Maze Runner.