By Rick Yancey
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.
I’m almost a broken record at this point…. Book sat on my shelf forever, never started, then I did, and Holy Crap I Loved It!
You can go home now.
Just kidding. I actually did write a review.
Enter Cassie, last woman on Earth. Or so it would seem. Cassie on an impossible journey to keep an impossible promise. A promise that is the only thing that matters as trust has eroded in the wake of a faceless enemy.
Damn, talk about a dark book. Dark, dark, dark. Nothing like an alien apocalypse to make you feel hopeless.
There are other narrators too, but Cassie was my favorite. I can’t talk much about the others without spoiling anything. But Cassie was awesome. Ass-kicking all the way through, in the tradition of Katniss or Triss.
Action packed from start to finish. There were some wonderful, wonderful lines in this book. Quotes like:
“How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.”
“Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.”
“I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.”
“But if I’m it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I’m going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.”
“The minute we decide that one person doesn´t matter anymore, they´ve won.”
“Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie?”
This book also brought Robert Frost’s poem, Fire and Ice, to my mind:
I have the second book, The Infinite Wave, on my shelf, which I may start right away. The 5th Wave movie is due in theaters soon and the third book in the trilogy is coming out this spring.
While I may have waited forever to start this series, it seems like now is a great time to become a fan of The 5th Wave series.
Here is the trailer for The 5th Wave movie:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmxLybfGNC4]
