Review Sunday: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

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The 5th Wave #1

Goodreads Blurb:

"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 had such high hopes for this book!  I read all the blurbs, all the non-spoilery reviews, and I was READY.  It just failed for me though.  Let me tell you why:

1.  The multiple POV's.  Now, it's not that I hated that there were multiple POV's, it's how they were presented.  By themselves, they helped the story so so much and gave me so much insight.  However, it wasn't announced whose head you're in and it isn't clear until at least 2 pages in.  This caused so many headaches for me because they just switched randomly around.  The only thing you're sure of is that there will be a POV change after every section.

2.  The section names.  Maybe they're meant to be symbolic, I have no idea.  What I do know is that they started out very nicely describing what was happening and then they just took a nose dive.  I don't think it was a very good idea to have a section change every time the POV changed.  Near the end, it was switching so often that the section names just lost all of their significance.

3.  Cassie and Evan.  Not this again.  I'm just so tired of the whole enemies falling in love thing!  After spending so many pages saying that you can't trust another human being, Cassie falls in love with a random guy who has been safe living in the woods with fire and has chocolate.  Judging from the rest of the book, that seem sosososososososo suspicious to me and yet she just says 'oooooo look how pretty he is!!'  *facepalm*

Those are the big things.  There are a select few things that were nice which is why this isn't 1 star.  I did like the 5th wave idea.  Once it's revealed what the 5th wave is, it makes so much sense (look psychologically!).  Also, the whole thing with the aliens was actually done very well.  It was everything else that didn't float my boat.

The Final Verdict:

While I did like the idea behind the book, I just couldn't take Cassie and Evan's relationship, the multiple POV's, the way things just didn't seem to connect together or make sense (making me want to put the book down) until the veeeery end, or the organization of the book.  Maybe I'll read the next book, maybe not.

2 stars

Quotes:

“That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.” 

“How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.” 

“Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.” 

“You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.”