Blog Tour - The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Title: The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave #1)

Author: Rick Yancey

Publisher: Putnam Juvenile

Release Date: May 7, 2013

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository

The Passage meets Ender's Game in an epic new series from award-winning author Rick Yancey.

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 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.

Before I say anything else, I will say this: this review is going to be different from the way I normally write reviews. With Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave there is so much going on, and the way I normally review books would simply reveal too much of the story. So bear with me.

Here's the thing about The 5th Wave, until I had a copy of the book in my hands all I really knew about the book was that everyone was freaking out about it, saying how amazing it was and how everyone needed to read it. Typically with books like that, I will sort of avoid them like the plague because by the time I get around to reading them, I'm always afraid they won't live up to what everyone has been saying or I've just become sick of hearing everyone gush about them. But with The 5th Wave all that hyping and gushing and screaming on rooftops that this book is amazing is completely warranted. Heck, at this point I'm joining in.

Going in, I knew based on what everyone had been saying that The 5th Wave was good. And it was, there is no doubt about it. What surprised me though, was just how affected I was by the story. Despite it revolving around an alien invasion of sorts, the story felt incredibly real. The different waves of the invasion and attack that are described in the story are completely realistic--who knows when a massive electromagnetic wave is going to shut down all power and networks or when earthquakes are going to cause massive tsunamis world wide? In this sense, the book really resonated with me. I could really believe in the story and in what the characters were going through. I won't lie, a good 90% of the time I was reading, I was thinking about how all of this could just as easily have been happening to me.

Just like the story resonated with me what, what the different characters went through affected me in much the same way. Without saying too much for fear of spoiling it for anyone, all the main characters in the book are put in extremely difficult situations where you almost need to re-evaluate your moral code. It felt to me like any moral code that might have existed before this whole thing started had to be thrown out the window if you wanted to have any chance of surviving. Because of that, I questioned a lot of the characters' actions while at the same time thinking that I probably wouldn't react the same way if I were ever in their position. And once it was revealed what the 5th wave actually was? Well I started questioning everything again, because there was no other way around it.

Just to clear the doubt, Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave is just as amazing as everyone has been saying it is. This is the kind of story that just affects you and resonates with you, and the characters will make you want to question everything you have ever known about the human race. This is not a light book by any stretch of the imagination. But it's a book that will have you thinking for a long time after you finish reading.