Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.
Oh, this book. Yancey, you had me. You HAD me. For the first 50% of this book, I was in awe. I was in raptures at the taught writing style, sentences that would make me gasp, the perilous life, fraught with terror, in the wave of the alien apocalypse. This was a five-star book, and I just was in LOVE with it for that first 50%.
And then...
I stopped buying it, and became increasingly frustrated with both the structure of the storytelling, as well as the plot choices. (spoiler-ific, avoid reading more if you're spoiler-shy. SERIOUSLY, don't read past this if you are desirous of a spoiler-free reading experience)
Okay, so...I'm so entirely upset because I had such high hopes, and because for the first half of the book, they were met and exceeded. You could have been so GOOD, book, so GOOD. This is going to sound all ranty, I can't really gather cohesive thoughts on it, so prepare yourself.
First issue: POV. The first half is told in Cassie's POV - and then half-way through, we get this abrupt switch to Ben. It gave me the equivalent of reader whiplash. There is also one small, tiny section told from Evan's POV, and one small section from Sam's, both of which are never returned to again. Then it just goes back and forth between Cassie's and Ben's POV. I understand why the author included Ben's POV because there really was no other way to tell his section of the story (more on that later), but geez, I just thought it was so annoying. I was used to Cassie by the half-way point of this, and found myself impatient to get Ben's POV sections out of the way so I could get back to the person I really cared about.
Second issue: Plot choices. Up until the second half, this plot had me guessing, enthralled, completely entangled in its originality. But THEN, oh, THEN. Geez. I'm actually heartbroken at what was such promise, gone so unfulfilled. We find out the aliens? Oh, yeah, they're doing the usual - body invasions. So they're implanted alien consciousness-beings inside of human bodies. YEAH, BECAUSE WE HAVE NEVER, EVER, EVER SEEN THAT DONE BEFORE. The aliens had to "give up" their bodies for some reason...like, to fit onto the mothership, or something? So apparently they can just slot themselves right into humans and become them. And they need the Earth because their own place is kaput, yadda yadda.
Okay. So, instead of just downloading themselves into the human bodies they wanted and then taking control of the planet, they decide to decimate the human population. Frequent references to "extermination" and such. They try to do so with as little damage to the ecosystem of earth as possible (um, but somehow the tsunamis/earthquake shenanigans doesn't count as damaging the earth?) so as to preserve it for their use. It seems like their end plan is to just save a few human bodies, enough for their race, and use them? Or maybe to just let their free-roaming consciousness-es roam the earth like atmospherically? So like, they wipe humans out in a variety of ways, and whatever, maybe I can hang with the plausibility of it until--
We find out that they are gathering up the children, to train them into armies, to send them out to kill the remaining humans, but they don't tell them that, the aliens, no. There are Aliens-masquerading-as-human-soldiers, and they tell the kiddos that the REAL alien-infested-humans are actually what we know to be the non-infested-still-human-humans, and we get this whole plot about how the kids are being trained to kill and being brainwashed at the same time, and their alien masters will then send them out to kill what the kids think are alien-infested-humans but what the aliens know to be just-normal-humans. At this point, I being to have so. many. ISSUES.
First of all. The aliens have this little chip-transmitter thingie they can insert into the human's necks. It's a tracker, but also a kill switch. Literally, they can just press a button and insta-death to the human. So, if you're going to go to all the trouble of planting spies into the human government, like, okay I see why you'd do military. But how about this WAY EASIER WAY OF KILLING PEOPLE ---after the plague they unleash via bird poop (yep), why don't you roll out your military masquerade and set up hospital camps everywhere? Tell people you're treating them for the plague. Insert the chip into their necks, tell them it's the antidote or whatever. Once you have everyone implanted, save the few bodies you're saving for move-in day, press the button. PRESTO, YOU JUST KILLED THE REMAINING MILLION HUMANS.
This, to me, sounds SO MUCH EASIER than the elaborate construct of separating kids from parents, collecting the kids, brainwashing the kids, training the kids, in a very complicated program that takes like months and months, pretending that you are human to the kids, convincing the kids that the real humans are actually the badguys, and then..dropping the kids off in remote locations to presumably slaughter the remaining human population with their machine guns. I mean, as I'm detailing this plan, you can see how it just grows more and more ridiculous, right? Right? Like, how much easier would it be to have a far less complicated plan of just posing as medical personnel and inserting the chips into everyone. Much less messy, much higher guaranteed success rate.
And maybe we're supposed to see this flaw in the plan or maybe the flaw is built-in so that in later books the humans can use the flaw to win, or whatever. But the entire book is telling us how much smarter the aliens are than the humans, how much more evolved, how the humans are cockroaches and the aliens are the highest life form, etc. So...if this is their real plan, I'm just having a really hard time reconciling those two things.
And then we get into the training-the-kids-as-militia plot. Okay. OKAY. I have ISSUES, here, not only with the plot's inception but also with its execution. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS WITH KIDS? They literally have a 7 year old who we're supposed to believe is trained to be competent with killing using an assault rifle. I understand, that does sometimes happen (think of child soldiers in genocide situations in Africa, etc). But these kids have just been ripped from their soft suburban lives. They're used to privilege. The reason the kids-as-warriors theme works in The Hunger Games is because that's the only life those kids have ever known. They are trained from infancy to be weapons and fighters, and if they're in the poorer districts, they face a constant fight for survival. It becomes plausible, then, that the children in the world of The Hunger Games could conceivably be ruthless killers, efficient in tactics of war and fighting.
But in this world, it's in suburban Ohio, in today's society. I had such a hard time buying into the idea that these kids would, in any probability or likelihood, be able to be trained and shaped into ruthless killing machines. From my grasp of the timeline, this happened in a matter of like, 2 months. I'm sorry, but I'm just not biting. Kids whose biggest concern was getting Starbucks after school and their dead cellphones, turned into accurate M16-users? The author tries vaguely to explain this away by talking about how if you survived the first couple of waves of extinction, you must be like a survivor and pretty hardy so then like it would totally make sense to just adapt naturally to the soldier life. And I suppose with kids, taking them from a traumatic situation and giving them structure to cling to could have some credence...but I'm just SO NOT BUYING THIS.
And to my most frustrated point of all - okay, so the aliens choose the ridiculously difficult route of masquerading-as-humans and sending the real humans to kill the remaining humans who really are human but only the aliens-as-humans know this and the humans-being-controlled-by-aliens-as-humans don't. WHY WOULD THEY CHOOSE CHILDREN. Why. still. WHY. One throw-away thing is used to explain this, like, "Children are the easiest to brainwash." Okay, whatever. Children are also SMALL. Weaker than adults. Lacking in full coordination, maturity, decision-making skills. If you want a team of highly-trained assassins who can overpower the real ADULT human survivors, you would not choose children. Like, maybe if they were all older teens, this would remain plausible. But they have 12 year olds on this team. The most bloodthirsty member of their squad is supposed to be a 7 year old girl who's an excellent shot with a machine gun. I DO NOT BUY. Kids are biologically just not going to be able to win out against adults, adults who have been hiding out and shooting anything that comes in sight of them - adults of basically equal skill levels paired against children are going to win, every time.
I mean, the one team of kid soldiers we see sent out into the field end up killing half of themselves all on their own, no outside killing necessary. I. DO NOT. BUY. I don't buy into the premise that the aliens would even choose this tactic in the first place, I don't buy that they'd choose children to enforce this tactic, and I don't buy that normal American kids can become highly-skilled, finely-honed killing machines in a matter of weeks. To me, this just felt like a ploy to be able to use the idea of child soldiers as the plot.
Now, Cassie's development into a badass is handled so believably. She reacts to killing the way you'd expect a suburban teen thrown into an apocalyptic scenario to react - with horror, and badly, but then growing into an uncomfortable acceptance of its necessity. She's what held this novel together for me, and she's why I give it 3 stars despite its second-half-spiral into plot chum. The writing is taut throughout, the prose beautiful in its chilling way. But oh, how this book failed the promise of its first half. It failed itself so hard. I'm distraught with the idea of what could have been.
I think mostly everyone will love this book. I think the plot holes I found so gratingly horrible will slide unnoticed by most. I think most people will get caught up in the adrenaline and just eat this book up. That's good, and fine. It's much better than most of the apocalyptic/dystopian fare out on the market today, and Cassie is a great heroine. I just could not stomach how increasingly stupid the plot became.
- Becca Rose
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