There is a final showdown with the alien commander, Colonel Vosch, which fails to end decisively only because there are sequels still to come. Air ducts large enough to admit human beings penetrate the supposedly ultra-secure Camp Haven, leading to places like the armory and the control center. Where the majority of the novel puts familiar alien invasion cliches to new and interesting uses, the climax is just cliched. Both Cassie and Ben vow to get him out of Camp Haven, and their overlapping rescue attempts occupy the book’s final pages. Far from being dead, Sam ends up training alongside Ben at Wright Patterson, now rechristened Camp Haven. That point of intersection is Cassie’s brother Sam.
The 5th Wave breaks down, in my opinion at least, where the Ben and Cassie stories intersect. Here too, I’m reminded of another author’s work–in this case Orson Scott Card’s Enders Game–but, like Cassie’s, Ben’s story stands on its own merits. But when Ben’s unit finally takes the field, it becomes clear that the ‘infested’ humans they’ve been sent to kill are simply human beings, which means the officers who sent them may very well be the enemy.Īgain, these early Ben sections tell a compelling story. Ben throws himself into his new role, seeing it as a path to redemption. Plucked from a tent city outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ben and other children–some as young as six and seven–are trained to be soldiers. Ben is further haunted by his panicked abandonment of his little sister, a failure he can never forget. Yancey’s second protagonist is Ben Parish, a former high school football star who has also lost everyone he ever loved, not to the plague or the Silencers, but to human looters. Though certainly derivative of Jack Finney’s The Bodysnatchers, these first few Cassie sections are my favorite portion the book.
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Could he even be the man–the thing–that shot her?Īll of the above makes for a pretty satisfying narrative, full of suspense and emotional turmoil. Unfortunately, evidence begins to mount that Evan is not exactly what he seems to be. While Cassie recovers from her wounds in Evan’s family home, she vacillates between trauma-fueled suspicion and a growing affection for her quiet, able host. Subsequent Cassie sections detail her peculiar escape and her subsequent rescue by Evan Walker, a taciturn farmboy who has also lost every member of his family, girlfriend included.
This first portion of the novel ends when Cassie is shot by a Silencer sniper. Through journal entries, Cassie introduces the world of novel and gives her backstory. Cassie has lost her entire family: her mother, her father, and her five year old brother, Sam. Once your typical high school girl, we first find Cassie weeping and shivering in a tent in the woods, clutching a battered teddy bear and an M16, a complete emotional wreck. The first is sixteen year old Cassie Sullivan, and the first hundred pages or so belong to her. Yancey’s novel contains two main point-of-view characters. In the fourth, alien ‘Silencers’ implanted into human beings hunt down those immune to the plague, ending trust and cooperation between survivors.
In the third, a plague carried by birds kills 97% of those who remain.
In the second wave, multiple tsunamis–created by gigantic metal rods dropped from orbit onto Earth’s fault lines–inundate the world’s coastlines, killing 40% of the population. In the first wave, an EMP weapon fries all electronic devices running on microchips, everything from cell phones and the computers to automobiles and airplanes.
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Instead, what happens is a calculated series of attacks on populations and infrastructure. Refreshingly, the invasion does not involve death rays destroying iconic architecture or jet vs. So, if you want to read The 5th Wave with any sort of suspense, you might want to hold off reading this review until afterward. I’m sorry, but this is pretty much unavoidable, as there are structural issues I want to discuss here, and to understand them I’m going to have to describe the plot of the book. FAIR WARNING: This review contains a hell of lot spoilers.