What do you think of when you think “alien invasion”? Independence Day? Ender’s Game? The 5th Wave will remind you of all these yet it is unique.
Alien horrors intent on destroying humanity? Check.
Young people fighting to save the earth? Check.
Now take this, multiply the drive to kill off humanity ten fold and throw in an ill-fated romance. Unique, yes?
Really Rotten Aliens
What makes this book so good is the sheer viciousness of the alien plans and the preview we see of what the aliens will face when (if) they finally exterminate humans. The extermination plans are diabolical. First an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes out all electric signals. That weakens earth’s nations and hobbles the armed forces. Then a giant tsunami that floods everywhere. That kills about 3 billion people. Then a plague to kill 97% of the rest.
That still leaves about 100 million human beings. The aliens, the Others, don’t want to hurt the planet, so they can’t drop an asteroid or set off nuclear weapons. As the book begins the Others are killing off the remnant off one by one with the fourth wave and are preparing for the fifth wave.
Spoiler Alert!!
The most evil of all their plans is their death camps. They bring in busloads of kids, reassure them, kill off about half immediately, then train the remaining half to do the killing. This is the fifth wave. This is the part that doesn’t make much sense; I can’t see why they would use kids and I sure didn’t understand why they blew up their own main base.
Puzzling Future Problems
The aliens will have a problem and we see glimpses of it in the main male character, Evan. You see, the aliens have no bodies. They gave their physical forms up when they left their home planet 10,000 years ago. They downloaded themselves into human minds to complete their work. Evan is one such human / alien meld and he finds being human all too tempting. He tells Cassie that most of the Others feel being human would be beneath them. Yet they must take on bodies to affect the physical world and finish the extermination.
I kept wondering what the aliens will do. If they have no bodies and they don’t want to be human, then do they continue to download themselves into human infants? Aliens die when their host body dies. How will they reproduce? If they intend to stay pure mind and not take on bodies, then why do they need to kill of humans? What use would they have for trees or animals or food?
The other point that puzzled me was the purpose of the fifth wave, human kids killing off humans. The fourth wave, Silencers or Others who look and act like humans, were effective killers. Why enlist little kids? Unless the Others were so twisted that it pleased them, I didn’t see a reason to switch from using Silencers to using fully human kids.
5 Stars but With a Catch
Overall I liked this book and look forward to a sequel. Yancey is an excellent writer who knows how to tell a story and enlist us in his characters’ lives. I felt like I was Cassie, alone, cold, frightened, driven to survive. I didn’t feel so much empathy for the second male character, Ben Parish who was at the boot camp learning to kill people. The whole boot camp section just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. In fact I put the book down for an evening because I got a little tired of it, a few too many cliches.
The first half with Cassie was excellent, 5 stars without a doubt. The second half with Ben was weaker and we had a bit too much of a miracle ending. So give that second half 3 stars for the Ben sections and 5 for Cassie.
Truly YA Fiction
Many of the YA fantasy fiction novels are classified as YA only because the characters are young. The 5th Wave is written for older teens. Adults will enjoy it as I did, but we’re more likely to look askew at the basic premise of aliens becoming human to kill off humans and we’ll be skeptical of the whole boot camp section.
If you can put aside your natural skepticism and take the book’s premise as valid you will enjoy this.
Leave a Reply