The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)

The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1) by Rick Yancey

Paperback, 460 pages

Published 7th May 2013 by Puffin

Shelves:  arc-or-review, books-i-own, dystopian, read-in-2013, series-or-companions, sci-fi, supernatural, to-read, too-much-hype, young-adult

My rating:  3.5 of 5 stars

Description via Goodreads:

The Passage meets The Hunger Games in a gripping new series from Carnegie-shortlisted 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. 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, until Cassie meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan may be her only hope for rescuing her brother and even saving herself. Now she must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up. Cassie Sullivan gets up.

The 5th Wave has undoubtedly been one of the most eagerly anticipated young adult books of 2013. There has been a lot of superb reviews for this book and it's not surprising, it is certainly sure to please a lot of fans of popular books such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. I have true belief that this will become one of the next successful series, as it seems to have everything that a young adult novel needs.

The first thing that I noted about this book when I picked it up was that it was science-fiction, a genre that has certainly surprised me in the past, it's a genre that I usually enjoy more than I expect. Thankfully, this book was still very realistic and the sci-fi element was at a very understandable level. Yancey clearly has a good idea about the science in his world, how each wave happened and what is coming next, but thankfully he doesn't overindulge in descriptions and technicalities and we learn about it all at a natural pace. Even if you're not particularly confident with this genre, this would probably be a good starting place.

A main element of this book is aliens, so I was very curious to see how they were portrayed. The aliens in this book are called the Others and they're so very different from your stereotypical bug-eyed green men - they aren't all that different from your average human, in fact some of them are human and they can be very difficult to detect. I fully admit that I didn't have a clue as to who could be trusted in this book - as soon as you start to connect with one character, something happens which could totally turn you the other way from them.

The narrators are the book are very well written. I particularly liked reading about the relationship between Cassie, her younger brother and her father. As individual characters, they all stood as firm unique people but their relationship was, for me, the real strength of the book, even when they were separated. I was also very intrigued by Evan, a boy that we're not sure that we can trust. I found one of our narrators, Ben Parish, to be a little more difficult to connect with and would hope to find out more from him in the next book(s). The characters are the  most important thing for me in any book and I was very pleased with the ones that Yancey conjured up for this series - they definitely have a lot of potential.

The reason why I didn't give this more stars is simply because I felt it was dragging out at points. I also find action scenes a bit tiring to keep up with and with the mixed narration, it was difficult to pick back up and remember who was narrating towards the end. Of course, as aforementioned, there were definitely a lot of positive aspects to the book and for the most part it was enjoyable. I'd definitely not hesitate to recommend this to anyone who is a fan of the YA genre and will most likely check out the next instalment in this series.