THE FIFTH WAVE by Rick Yancey
5 Stars
Verdict: Utterly immersive.
I picked up this book knowing it will be a rough ride, and so the opening didn’t disappoint. The concept isn’t actually original, but it pulled me in and kept my heart racing. I felt the setting immediately, and became immersed within a page.
The blurb is melodramatic, vague , and utterly gimmicky. This book is actually about a girl who has survived waves and waves of unnatural disasters, who needs to survive just that little bit longer to fulfil a promise to her brother, and a boy, who is being trained as a soldier to fight for humanity - a battle that already feels lost.
The characters are what make this novel exceptional. They’re broken, fighting for survival, and struggling with trust in a world ruined by the previous waves. Their whole lives are gutted out for us to see, mixing past and present to make us feel the weight of their personal baggage.
It’s the questions they asked which really kept me engaged throughout. I wasn’t really expecting the story to split off at different characters in different situations, but once I could figure out who was taking – which got easier throughout the book – it gave a rich sense of world building. This is one of those novels where I wasn’t counting the pages, but enjoying the ride, and disappearing inside the world and enjoying it from start to finish.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’ve seen the reviews and I’m not really too surprised they’re a little low. It’s not the story than makes this book epic, it’s the characters and the emotion embedded in the writing. It’s the reader’s imagination too, as a lot is left for pondering, wondering, imaging what would happen to you in this situation. That’s not always an easy thing to convey in a film. What is easy is the generic alien invasion action, and that’s not really the beauty of this book.
Source: Bought it myself!
I picked up this book knowing it will be a rough ride, and so the opening didn’t disappoint. The concept isn’t actually original, but it pulled me in and kept my heart racing. I felt the setting immediately, and became immersed within a page.
The blurb is melodramatic, vague , and utterly gimmicky. This book is actually about a girl who has survived waves and waves of unnatural disasters, who needs to survive just that little bit longer to fulfil a promise to her brother, and a boy, who is being trained as a soldier to fight for humanity - a battle that already feels lost.
The characters are what make this novel exceptional. They’re broken, fighting for survival, and struggling with trust in a world ruined by the previous waves. Their whole lives are gutted out for us to see, mixing past and present to make us feel the weight of their personal baggage.
It’s the questions they asked which really kept me engaged throughout. I wasn’t really expecting the story to split off at different characters in different situations, but once I could figure out who was taking – which got easier throughout the book – it gave a rich sense of world building. This is one of those novels where I wasn’t counting the pages, but enjoying the ride, and disappearing inside the world and enjoying it from start to finish.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’ve seen the reviews and I’m not really too surprised they’re a little low. It’s not the story than makes this book epic, it’s the characters and the emotion embedded in the writing. It’s the reader’s imagination too, as a lot is left for pondering, wondering, imaging what would happen to you in this situation. That’s not always an easy thing to convey in a film. What is easy is the generic alien invasion action, and that’s not really the beauty of this book.
Source: Bought it myself!
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