This is an excellent book. Rick Yancey, author of the Printz-Honor winning Monstrumologist series and The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, has delivered a remarkable tale that manages to revitalize the idea of an alien invasion, in which the aliens are brutally efficient without ever apparently leaving their space ship in orbit around the Earth. Thanks to the constant paranoia, the knowledge that no one can be trusted, this book is terrifying on a level that few other novels aimed at teenagers are able to be. Although, admittedly, this book does not have any truly original ideas, all the elements it takes from other novels are pieced together in a way that makes them uniquely its own, and the characters are so strong that you do not care about any derivative tendencies. You could argue that Cassie is a carbon copy of Katniss from The Hunger Games, what with her protectiveness of her younger brother, her toughness, and her uncaring, unfeeling exterior that hides her vulnerabilities. But, in my opinion, she is an even stronger character than Katniss is, because the book also shows through a series of flashbacks in the first hundred pages or so how the waves forced Cassie to change from your average teen girl who frets over her hair and has had a crush on the school jock since third grade to the tough survivalist she is now. This extra dimension adds a certain accessibility to her character on a level that Katniss never had. And although she is easily the most developed character in The Fifth Wave, all the others are fascinating in their own right. The plot, also, is compelling, with several surprising plot twists toward the end. There are also a couple that were a bit more expected, but they were not really meant to be completely unforeseen. Cassie's plot line has a bit of a slow burn feel to it, but Zombie's story is much faster paced, so the book never feels plodding. The different plot threads start out separate, but they gradually merge together in a way that is fascinating. It should also be noted that the writing style is brilliant, simultaneously literary and accessible, with the ability to provide mesmerizing turns of phrase without slowing down the pace at all. The two main points of view are written in first person present, but both voices are distinct and authentic. There are also a couple of minor points of view that lasted only for a couple of short chapters (one of a Silencer, the other of Cassie's younger brother), both of which were written in third person present and contributed to the novel as a whole. Readers should be aware that there are around five f-bombs interspersed throughout the novel, as well as some milder language, and that the violence is frequent and brutal. Sexual content is kept mainly to kissing and a couple of discussions of sex, but there are several romantic plot threads, which might annoy some people who don't like anything resembling romance in their novels. However, they add a lot to the story and are key to enabling growth in several major characters, including Cassie. This is easily one of the best books I have read, sitting at number three or four on my list of favorite books. With a broad mainstream appeal and an extensive marketing campaign, this book is set to make a major splash commercially as well as critically. This book genuinely deserves to make it big, unlike many of the novels that have gotten extensive backing from publishers in the past.

Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave is perhaps the young adult novel of the season. It’s been accompanied by a massive promotional push, with what seems like every Barnes & Noble in the world pushing it as the inevitable successor to Twilight, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games. And unlike 2012’s event YA book—John Green’s justly acclaimed The Fault In Our Stars—The 5th Wave has a premise that promises at least two more books to come: There are aliens, and there is a girl, and Earth has been invaded. What next? Truth be told, there’s something almost calculated about The 5th Wave, even when it’s at its best. Yancey is a good writer and a fantastic plotter, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been kicking around this idea in his head for many years. But with its post-apocalyptic setting, competing love interests, and teenage girl protagonist—the very intelligent, deeply sullen Cassie (though sullenness is forgivable in a girl whose family has been torn apart)—The 5th Wave sometimes feels as if Yancey constructed an alien invasion (instead of a really strange reality-TV/Iraq War allegory) around The Hunger Games’ bare bones. Like Katniss Everdeen, Cassie has had to teach herself to survive in an unforgiving landscape. Like Katniss, she narrates the book in a limited first-person perspective. And like Katniss, she has her fair share of blind spots that become evident to readers long before they become evident to Cassie. Truth be told, I found The 5th Wave deeply annoying for roughly two-thirds of its page count. I liked the early sections, when Cassie explains how the aliens decimated Earth’s population without setting foot on the planet. They knock out our power, then destroy the coasts with controlled tsunamis before unleashing a plague that kills 97 percent of everyone left. Only then do the aliens begin to show their hands. This is not a force humanity can easily compete with, appropriate for a species that crossed such great distances to find a new home. But after that opening section, the book settles into a two-pronged storyline. Cassie recovers from a potentially fatal injury with the help of a boy named Evan at his strangely pristine rural Ohio farm. Meanwhile at a nearby military base, Cassie’s old crush, Ben, is trained in alien destruction. Along the way, Ben’s joined by Cassie’s younger brother, Sammy. Here, Yancey flirts with having the whole book fall apart. The problem is this: It’s immediately obvious that Evan is one of the aliens who appear to be human, while it’s also obvious that the military men training Ben are similarly alien emissaries. They are training humanity’s teenagers and children to wipe out other parts of the population and further isolate humans—whose strength, the aliens have determined, arises best when they’re allowed to gather and hatch plans—from one another. But because the book is told from Cassie’s and Ben’s points of view—with more emphasis on Cassie, who’s more easily blinded by her own anger and prejudices—the characters seem to miss clues about their captors’ true motives that readers will pick up on as soon as Evan and the military personnel show up in the book’s narrative. It’s generally good to let readers piece together things like this on their own. It’s enthralling to get just enough ahead of characters to be excited about what’s coming next. But Yancey seems to deliberately let readers get so far ahead of Cassie and Ben that the rest of the book threatens to become a slog. Fortunately, Cassie and Ben are pleasant enough company to spend time inside their heads. (Well, Cassie gets close to being too stereotypical in some sections, losing some of her prickly shading, particularly in the early going.) This makes the book more or less painless and easy to read, even when it seems like Yancey’s building to a couple of twists that will be the opposite of big reveals for most readers. Also, Yancey does a good enough job messing with readers’ heads in the Ben storyline, especially, that there are a few places where I wondered if I might have misjudged the whole thing—if the military men, who seemed to have a solid enough explanation for their odd behavior, really were using scavenged alien technology to root out traitors who only looked like humans. There’s less ambiguity in the Evan storyline, but it also seems possible that Yancey intends a lot of this, as when Evan cries out, “You saved me!” after having maybe-sex with Cassie—it sure seems like sex, but later Cassie says no boy has ever seen her naked, and, well—and Cassie just doesn’t get what he’s talking about. Yet it’s possible that if Yancey wanted readers to know what was up from page one, that would just make the reveals even more irritating when they came. And the longer he delays them—again, roughly two-thirds of the book—the more tempting it is to just give up. But in the final third, after Ben finds out he’s working for the aliens and Cassie discovers she’s fallen in love with one in rapid succes