Genre: Young Adult (Science Fiction)
Date Published: May 7, 2013
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.
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.
The 5th Wave is the first book in the 5th Wave trilogy by Rick Yancey. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I first started reading this book, but it wasn't what I got. It was a lot better! It kept me wondering the whole time. Who's good? Who's bad? Are they really aliens? Is it the government? Is it both? I'm still wondering. You're given multiple viewpoints. Cassie's point of view kept my attention the most. It was a little draggy around the boot camp parts, but that's really the only fault I have with it. There's romance, but not too much, there's action, but it's not over done, and there are twists and surprises. I think this book offers variety to its audience. I'm so curious for more it's ridiculous, and I'm super exited and nervous that they are making a movie. I hope they do it up right. Update: (10/26/15) I just added the movie trailer towards the bottom of this post. It looks pretty darn good. Love the casting. I'm getting more excited now!!
If you haven't read the first book, check out my review below!!
Rick is a native Floridian and a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago. He earned a B.A. in English which he put to use as a field officer for the Internal Revenue Service. Inspired and encouraged by his wife, he decided his degree might also be useful in writing books and in 2004 he began writing full-time.
Since then he has launched two critically acclaimed series: The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, for young readers, and The Highly Effective Detective, for adults. Both books are set in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Rick lived for ten years before returning to Florida.
To learn more about Rick Yancey and his books, visit his website.You can also find him on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.
THE 1ST WAVE took out half a million people.
The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.
In case you don’t know, we live on a restless planet. The continents sit on slabs of rock, called tectonic plates, and those plates float on a sea of molten lava. They’re constantly scraping and rubbing and pushing against one another, creating enormous pressure.
Over time the pressure builds and builds, until the plates slip, releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of earthquakes.
If one of those quakes happens along one of the fault lines that ring every continent, the shock wave produces a superwave called a tsunami.
Over 40 percent of the world’s population lives within sixty miles of a coastline. That’s three billion people.
All the Others had to do was make it rain.
Take a metal rod twice as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as heavy. Position it over one of these fault lines. Drop it from the upper atmosphere. You don’t need any propulsion or guidance system; just let it fall.
Thanks to gravity, by the time it reaches the surface, it’s traveling twelve miles per second, twenty times faster than a speeding bullet. It hits the surface with a force one billion times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Bye-bye, New York. Bye, Sydney. Good-bye, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. So long, Eastern Seaboard.
Japan, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Rio.
Nice to know you. Hope you enjoyed your stay!
The 1st Wave was over in seconds.
The 2nd Wave lasted a little longer. About a day.
The 3rd Wave? That took a little longer—twelve weeks. Twelve weeks to kill . . . well, Dad figured 97 percent of those of us unlucky enough to have survived the fi rst two waves.
Ninety-seven percent of four billion? You do the math.
That’s when the Alien Empire descended in their fl ying saucers and started blasting away, right? When the people of the Earth united under one banner to play David versus Goliath. Our tanks against your ray guns. Bring it on!
We weren’t that lucky.
And they weren’t that stupid.
How do you waste nearly four billion people in three months?
Birds.
How many birds are there in the world? Wanna guess? A million?
A billion? How about over three hundred billion? That’s about seventy-fi ve birds for each man, woman, and child still alive after the first two waves.
There are thousands of species of bird on every continent. And birds don’t recognize borders. They also crap a lot. They crap five or six times a day. That’s over a trillion little missiles raining down each day, every day.
You couldn’t invent a more efficient delivery system for a virus that has a 97 percent kill rate.
My father thought they must have taken something like Ebola Zaire and genetically altered it. Ebola can’t spread through the air.
But change a single protein and you can make it airborne, like the flu. The virus takes up residence in your lungs. You get a bad cough. Fever. Your head starts to hurt. Hurt bad. You start spitting up little drops of virus-laden blood.
The bug moves into your liver, your kidneys, your brain. You’re packing a billion of them now. You’ve become a viral bomb. And when you explode, you blast everyone around you with the virus. They call it bleeding out.
Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, the virus erupts out of every opening. Your mouth, your nose, your ears, your ass, even your eyes. You literally cry tears of blood.
We had different names for it. The Red Death or the Blood Plague. The Pestilence. The Red Tsunami. The Fourth Horseman.
Whatever you wanted to call it, after three months, ninety-seven out of every hundred people were dead.
That’s a lot of bloody tears.
The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.
In case you don’t know, we live on a restless planet. The continents sit on slabs of rock, called tectonic plates, and those plates float on a sea of molten lava. They’re constantly scraping and rubbing and pushing against one another, creating enormous pressure.
Over time the pressure builds and builds, until the plates slip, releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of earthquakes.
If one of those quakes happens along one of the fault lines that ring every continent, the shock wave produces a superwave called a tsunami.
Over 40 percent of the world’s population lives within sixty miles of a coastline. That’s three billion people.
All the Others had to do was make it rain.
Take a metal rod twice as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as heavy. Position it over one of these fault lines. Drop it from the upper atmosphere. You don’t need any propulsion or guidance system; just let it fall.
Thanks to gravity, by the time it reaches the surface, it’s traveling twelve miles per second, twenty times faster than a speeding bullet. It hits the surface with a force one billion times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Bye-bye, New York. Bye, Sydney. Good-bye, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. So long, Eastern Seaboard.
Japan, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Rio.
Nice to know you. Hope you enjoyed your stay!
The 1st Wave was over in seconds.
The 2nd Wave lasted a little longer. About a day.
The 3rd Wave? That took a little longer—twelve weeks. Twelve weeks to kill . . . well, Dad figured 97 percent of those of us unlucky enough to have survived the fi rst two waves.
Ninety-seven percent of four billion? You do the math.
That’s when the Alien Empire descended in their fl ying saucers and started blasting away, right? When the people of the Earth united under one banner to play David versus Goliath. Our tanks against your ray guns. Bring it on!
We weren’t that lucky.
And they weren’t that stupid.
How do you waste nearly four billion people in three months?
Birds.
How many birds are there in the world? Wanna guess? A million?
A billion? How about over three hundred billion? That’s about seventy-fi ve birds for each man, woman, and child still alive after the first two waves.
There are thousands of species of bird on every continent. And birds don’t recognize borders. They also crap a lot. They crap five or six times a day. That’s over a trillion little missiles raining down each day, every day.
You couldn’t invent a more efficient delivery system for a virus that has a 97 percent kill rate.
My father thought they must have taken something like Ebola Zaire and genetically altered it. Ebola can’t spread through the air.
But change a single protein and you can make it airborne, like the flu. The virus takes up residence in your lungs. You get a bad cough. Fever. Your head starts to hurt. Hurt bad. You start spitting up little drops of virus-laden blood.
The bug moves into your liver, your kidneys, your brain. You’re packing a billion of them now. You’ve become a viral bomb. And when you explode, you blast everyone around you with the virus. They call it bleeding out.
Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, the virus erupts out of every opening. Your mouth, your nose, your ears, your ass, even your eyes. You literally cry tears of blood.
We had different names for it. The Red Death or the Blood Plague. The Pestilence. The Red Tsunami. The Fourth Horseman.
Whatever you wanted to call it, after three months, ninety-seven out of every hundred people were dead.
That’s a lot of bloody tears.
If you haven't read the first book, check out my review below!!
Since then he has launched two critically acclaimed series: The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, for young readers, and The Highly Effective Detective, for adults. Both books are set in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Rick lived for ten years before returning to Florida.
To learn more about Rick Yancey and his books, visit his website.You can also find him on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.
Yay yet another glowing review for this book, I need to check it out asap.
ReplyDeleteLauren @ Northern Plunder
Yes you do! :)
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