Holly's Book Reviews

"I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here."

    WOW! This was my first ever Rick Yancey novel and I was so not disappointed! The 5th Wave follows 16 year old Cassie Sullivan as she survives through the invasion of Earth. After watching both of her parents' deaths, the only thing she knows is that she MUST find her young brother who was taken on a yellow school bus with mysterious soldiers. Along the way she meets a boy who makes her question everything she thought she knew.

    I absolutely loved this. Whether it was the writing, the plot, or the characters, this book is always going to be a favorite when it comes to sci-fi. I've never really read an alien book before because Hollywood has worn out the effects of it. I've always compared it to the zombie Apocalypse (and I won't like that I was hoping the corpses would revive) and I'm surprised in the way this topic was approached. We've all wondered if aliens would be friendly and if they'd truly 'come in peace'. This felt very realistic. The flashbacks worked wonders for truly giving the sense of how humans process and how we deny when things go wrong.

    CHARACTERS

  CASSIE: I felt that Cassie was perfect as our MC. She acted like a 16 year old WOULD in the event that this happened. She froze,panicked,adapted to the situation,and even cried herself to sleep at night. She was very "this is how it needs to be, not what it would have been months ago." Of course, I can't blame her for confiding in the one person who seems to be the one for her. Coincidences, huh? 

ETHAN: He literally sounds like a Teddy- Bear. Can I have an Ethan?? I was always wary of him, but I'm glad that things ended the way they did.I hope that he's okay because he's like Super-Man and I could get so lost in this boy's eyes! I'm really wanting the next book in the series ( I think it's a duology? ) before I explode with feels.

SAM: Sam is the sweetest kid ever. I wanted to hug him and tell him that it'd be okay, that he just had to hang tight and become a good judge of character. They always say that things have to become really bad for it to get better & this kid has seen way more than he's needed to in his short life. Oh god, the flashbacks? My heart broke and then melted into a puddle. He had to grow up and in his time at the camp, he lost a piece of himself and I'm afraid this may not end well.

BEN: Still unsure about this fella. 

PLOT

     This book. This book set my brain on fire, in a good way. After we received more information about the other's, I had to put the book down and process this in the real world setting. My setting. How many things are in our daily life that we are unaware of? I ended up talking the ear off of my stepdad ( who is a fellow geek so he didn't particularly mind ) and I've come to the conclusion that the world is very scary and it's a wonderful thing that we don't know everything.