The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

The Blurb On The Back:

The 1st Wave
Took out half a million people.

The 2nd Wave
Put that number to shame.

The 3rd Wave
Lasted a little longer, twelve weeks … four billion dead.

In the 4th Wave,
You can’t trust that people are still people.

And the 5th Wave?
No one knows.
But it’s coming.

On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs.
Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered the Earth’s last survivors.

To stay alone is to stay alive, until she meets Evan Walker.
Beguiling and mysterious, Evan may be her only hope.

Now Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Rick Yancey’s YA post-apocalyptic SF novel (the first in a trilogy) starts off strong but the introduction of different points of view really diminishes the tension by spoiling many of the coming twists. I loved Cassie – strong, sarcastic, smart but vulnerable – and totally believed in what she’d been through but the other characters (including Evan and Zombie) suffer in comparison. I also wasn’t quite convinced by the alien invaders or their plan for destroying humanity (which seemed needlessly complicated given their obvious technological advantage), although I did like the way the surviving humans keep trying to second-guess both their motives and what will happen next. I enjoyed the book enough to want to read the sequel but it didn’t quite live up to the awesome opening.