The 5th Wave: The First Book of the 5th Wave Series

Loved this book!! Read it after the movie and I love the book wayyyy more. About a girl who is trying to survive these waves of the alien invasion. You will fall in love with the characters and the bonds they build.

Loved this book! Some dystopian books don't have much comedic relief, but with this book I'd beg to differ. Again great book and highly recommend!

This book is FANTASTIC. Seriously, I don't even know where to begin. I bought this book earlier this week after I hard started to hear some of the buzz around it the week before. I don't read a lot of sci-fi so I wasn't at all sure that I'd be that interested in reading it--ESPECIALLY because it dealt with an Alien Invasion. Anyone who knows me KNOWS that that's just not my cup of tea.

But the reviews were rave, the comparisons to the much-loved Hunger Games series was there. I couldn't *NOT* sneak a peek. So, I downloaded the free sampler version of the book and sped-read through those. I was left breathless and in need of more. It only took a minute or so, and I bought the whole book and recommended that my sci-fi-loving boyfriend pick it up and read it with me.

Then, I just couldn't put it down.

Thank God I waited until the semester was over before I bothered to pick it up, or I for sure wouldn't used more time reading it than I would have studying for my finals.

The deal is: the aliens have come. They've caused disaster after disaster on Earth, and BILLIONS of people have been wiped out. We're down to the last of us, and there's no one you can trust because you know what? They've gotten inside us. They look like us and they know how we think.

This is the world Cassie, Zombie, Evan, and Sam live in. As is typical in most YA fiction, the adults are absent (done away with in this instance). They have to fend for themselves and learn the truth about what's really going on in their world, and they must decide whether they have enough left in them to fight back.

The narrative is choppy, matter-of-fact, in a "deep POV" perspective. This has advantages and disadvantages, I think. One being that you, as the reader, are so highly absorbed in the material immediately. Things are happening so quickly, and they're happening TO YOU (or so it seems). Time seems to be somewhat fluid, as we jump from character to character, from past and present (in terms of memory), and we're so intimately close to the characters when they are speaking in turn that we can sympathize with them individually. Where I think this becomes a disadvantage, however, is limitations the deep POV perspective places on the ability of the reader to paint a picture in their minds. Sometimes, the action sequences are so rapid, it's difficult to get a handle on what exactly is playing out before us. Additionally, writing in first person for every single main character presents the challenge of individualizing each of the voices so that you can tell right away whose head your in. I think the author did a great job of establishing the shift early on, but sometimes, the repetition of phrases across characters can make it difficult to distinguish the characters because it seems that they share a common thought process/terminology.

Overall, the story is fast-paced and well-told. I saw some reviews that protested against Cassie's budding romance with Evan--but I saw no issue with that particular aspect of the novel at all. She is in recovery at the time of the romance's start, and her tendency to fall back into thinking like a teen-aged school girl with a crush was not something I found that problematic--even given the dire circumstances of facing the end of the world. For me, her thoughts that some write off as frivolous and silly only demonstrated her youth and humanity to me. I know it's the end of the world; does that mean a girl shouldn't have the chance to experience something like love, which has power strong enough to sustain a person, to drive them, to feed them? Though I may concede that her romance with Evan does kind of slide along a little faster than I would've liked, I still didn't have much issue with it considering the circumstances.

By the novel's end, I felt satisfied that my anxieties had been answered. I like that the end is not so neat, so perfect, and I like that there is a measure of growth and maturity that is reflected in the main characters. I am most definitely looking forward to the second book in the series, and am basically kicking myself for not waiting longer to read this book. Since it's so new, I'm sure I'm going to have to wait a year for the next one, and that is just pure agony.

In the meantime, I do intend to set about harassing everyone I know to pick up this book. It is FABULOUS. And remember, I hate alien stories and read very little sci-fi (but I do read lots of YA). I'd say that's pretty high praise.

**In all my excitement to give this book 5-stars, I neglected to address the amount of violence and blood in this book. Definitely not for the faint of heart if you can't handle it. For me, while the book has potential to be disturbing based on the sheer violence it contains, I personally did not find it better/worse than Hunger Games or Divergent, or any other dystopian YA I've read.

An engaging read

I didn’t intend to borrow this book from the library. Wow, was I lucky. It as a tense read and I wondered where I was going it it was hard to put down. Sure, there was a bit of Ender’s Game and Divergent but that isn’t a bad thing.

Well it wasn't bad but very slow at first. I almost dnf it because it was dragging but I figure I'll keep reading. It actually got good towards the end. But if Evan is dead I am going to be really mad. Time for book 2 of the series!