The 5th Wave
Book #1
by Rick Yancey
Read by Phoebe Strole & Brandon Espinoza

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi

After the alien mothership appeared, there were 4 waves of disasters that left very few humans alive. Those that are left don’t know who to trust. And they don’t know when the 5th wave might come.

I was there for part 1; I was in it. Cassie is alone, trying to survive the harsh, cold winter, with no idea if any other humans are even left alive or not. In disjointed flashbacks, she tells us the story of the first 4 waves. Then comes part 2, where we switch to another POV: Zombie (just a nickname), who just managed to survive the wave that killed the largest number of humans. The story shifts gears here, as Zombie is living on a base with a lot of other people. He doesn’t seem to know what Cassie knows, though, which is not to trust anyone. I started to get a little confused about who was really good or bad at this point too, but I was still there, still engaged. Then part 3 takes another turn, a short section with a new, more mysterious POV, and the follow-up to that is part 4—back to Cassie. There begins my least-favorite aspect of the entire book: the romance.

To be fair, I often don’t like romance in YA books, because they’re too immature for my tastes. But here we have Evan, who is mentioned in the official synopsis but doesn’t appear until 1/3 of the way into the book. Evan is kind of creepy, lurking around outside of doors and disappearing for chunks of time with no explanation. But he’s good-looking, and Cassie has been alone for a while, so…romantic, I guess.

Then part 5 comes. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Cassie has a 5-year-old brother who was taken away by soldiers and whom Cassie is determined to find again. And that’s where we go with part 5. Fortunately, it’s only 25 pages, but having the 5-year-old as a POV character felt like taking a huge left turn. And I’m not really sure it was necessary. From there, we go back and forth between Zombie’s and Cassie’s POVs, as Zombie is turned into a soldier and Cassie makes plans to look for her brother, with Evan acting as an anchor holding her back. Zombie’s parts are generally fine, and serve to propel the reader’s understanding of the world forward more than Cassie’s do from this point on, since she’s mostly just focused on 2 people—Evan and Sammy (her brother). I hated Cassie’s sections (and pretty much Cassie herself) from this point on, because she keeps finding more and more reasons not to trust Evan and yet talks herself out of letting it make a difference. Because she’s falling for him or something? I just didn’t care anymore. And then to make things worse, the romance turned into a potential triangle at the end of the book, in a way that I really didn’t like.

I listened to the audiobook, and the narrators were good, but even there, since there are technically 4 POVs by the end, splitting the extra 2 smaller ones between the narrators of the main characters is a little weird. Plenty of books have both male and female POV characters and use only one narrator, so maybe this one would have been better off with just one. That’s the least of my issues with the book though.

In case it’s not clear, I don’t really recommend this book to anyone. I was telling my 15-year-old daughter about it as I went along (without spoilers), and most of the things that bothered me as I went didn’t concern her. By the end, though, a few of the romance-related things did make her decide not to read it, but that means that other teens, at least, might find more to like here than I did. For me, there ended up being too much focus on romance and not enough on plot.

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