Review: The 5th Wave

First in a trilogy
By Rick Yancey
Available now from Putnam Juvenile
Review copy

Sometimes the best books are the hardest to talk about.  I mean, I could go on for paragraphs about the structure of THE 5TH WAVE.  The book jumps from narrator to narrator.  The first hundred pages are spent with Cassie - short for Cassiopeia - and the book leaves her head as soon as she's in mortal danger.  Point of view is used to obscure who is an alien, a human, or if there's a difference.

I could talk about how there is a girl with two male love interests (sorta) and a boy with two female love interests (sorta) but none of that matters compared to how much the girl and boy love a little kid and want to protect him even when there's nothing left in the world but survival and saving the kid could mean dying.

I could talk about how this is top notch, classic horror science fiction, told beautifully.  That the book itself explores how literature, how we write and read and how that affects us, makes us human.  It's a binding experience.  How I see little touches of War of the Worlds and other classic "the aliens are here and they're gonna kill us" stories but that THE 5TH WAVE is so absorbing because it does it's own thing.  Sure, each of the waves are familiar, but combined they create the effect of a new invasion.  This invasion is as intimate as the Yeerks in the Animorphs and as impersonal as the Death Star firing on Alderaan.

Mostly, I think I could talk about how I need a sequel.  I don't know if there is going to be a sequel, I haven't checked, and the book certainly ends in a place that could be the end . . . but I want more.  Those who survive may not know it, but there is so much left in their world.  (Sorry for that awkward phrasing but I'm not giving away who lives and who dies!) (And a little research tells me it will be a trilogy - hooray!  Ignore everything I've ever said about wanting more standalone novels.)

I'm writing this review in February.  THE 5TH WAVE comes out in May and Penguin has already started some serious publicity efforts.  I'm sure by the time the book comes out and I post this review on my blog there will be a huge build-up of hype and backlash to that hype.  So just try to ignore all the hype, block out a few quiet hours for yourself, and read THE 5TH WAVE.  I know, you're saying it's nearly five hundred pages long and you're going to need more than a few hours, but this puppy flew by.  Mostly because I couldn't stop until I knew what happened.

Fantasy

Fantasy with Libba Bray, Justine Larbalestier, Lisa McMann, and Rick Yancey

This was the shortest of the panels, since lunch ran long. It began with Lisa McMann turning a broken rose into a jacket decoration and each of the authors telling something about themselves and their books, Lisa's being WAKE and FADE.



Justine Larbalestier pointed out her Australian heritage, marking her as the one in the panel with an accent. (Carrie Jones had a cute Maine accent and Shana Burg had a nice Boston one.) Of course, it soon became a competition to see who had the most hot guys and dead bodies in their book. (Winner seemed to be Justine, who's LIAR contained both, whereas the others seemed to tend toward one or the other.)



But this mini-contest led to the authors discovering an important fact: the responsiveness of the audience. Libba Bray discovered she could conduct the audience's roars of appreciation.

Being brave (she did wear a cow suit in the GOING BOVINE trailer, which I point out in my interview), Libba offered the following advice to teens: don't let a guy or girl talk you into doing LSD and then going to see Aliens.



And no, it didn't come as surprise to anyone when the authors admitted that they hadn't been popular in high school. (I believe Justine put it, "We're writers.") However, high school was good for one thing: writing stuff that would get rejected. Generally, they all had darlings they hoped would eventually get published. (WAKE was one for Lisa.) On the other hand, some of those earlier books will never see the light of day. For Rick Yancey, it was his second book.

Fortunately, Libba misheard him and thought he said sex book. Rick joked that it might sell if he rewrote it with sex, but nope, it was just his second book. (His newest, THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, isn't a sex book either.)



They also discussed their reading audiences, mostly boys versus girls. Lisa likes that her covers and content are fairly gender neutral. But none of them seemed to want to limit their audience; they wanted their books to entertain and reach as many people as possible. Once again, it was a very amusing panel. It made me very sad I missed Libba's keynote address, since she was cracking a joke a minute.