K-SCORE: 8
Author: Rick Yancey
YA doesn’t have to be this bad. I get that I was spoiled by the brilliance of Harry Potter growing up, but my latest forays into the world of young adult fiction have been more than just mean regression. The 5th Wave is frustratingly terrible, taking a generally uninteresting premise with perhaps a unique element or two, and squandering it on writing that is subpar in almost all of the ways writing can be subpar. I do not understand how this man has agents, editors, readers, and movie deals.
Let me tell you what you’re going to get if you pick up The 5th Wave and lay into it like a bag of Fritos. You’re going to get a tasteless story about aliens obliterating humankind, killing almost everyone, and tricking a few straggling children ranging in ages from five to eighteen into strapping M-16 machine guns across their tiny developing shoulders and laying waste to each other in a miasmic haze of senseless violence and poorly thought out plot. All of this will be told through the perspectives of said teenagers, usually Cassie, an angsty sixteen-year-old girl who has not-so-secret crushes on the cute boys she comes across and a penchant for changing her mind from one sentence to the next, or Ben, who is FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL! They have the same narrative voice, the same likes and dislikes (likes little boy Sammy, dislikes that aliens have brought about the apocalypse), the same disregard for planning, the same internal monologue saying things like, “trust your instincts,” the same base motivations, the same backstories (dead parents), the same irritating habit of spending two of every three of their thoughts complaining about how everything's different now and they don’t even know who they are anymore and how their emotions are numbed. They also have the same mission (rescue Sammy) and are in close to the same location throughout the novel, but they don’t actually meet up to accomplish this goal until fifty pages from the end. When they do, they succeed on the backs of alien traitors, Dr. Evil-esque mistakes on the part of the villainous alien/human hybrid army folk, and explosions that consume everything right up to the backs of their heels.
Do you like YA fiction that features wandering, self-possessed inner-monologues of teenagers? Don’t worry, The 5th Wave’s got plenty of that. Do you like YA fiction that features murdered off parents so said teens can fall uninhibited into each other’s PG-13 arms? Don’t worry, The 5th Wave’s on top of that. Do you like YA fiction that features truly grotesque and life-altering violence, but is afraid to tiptoe too close to bad language and sexual content? Don’t worry, The 5th Wave’s right there with you. Do you like YA fiction that has characters who are constantly getting knocked unconscious and then waking up conveniently in key locales near vital people in the society? Don’t panic! The 5th Wave never wants to leave someone conscious for very long. Do you like YA that has lead characters who, despite having no real skill set, no noteworthy intellect, and aren’t even remarkably good-hearted, manage to stumble their way into roles as the most crucial warriors of the resistance against <insert premise>? Well, look no further people. The 5th Wave used just the right-shaped cookie cutter when creating characters that you’ve been looking for. Why reread The Hunger Games when you could spend $10 on a different title, different names (Cassie versus Katniss), and different cover art?
I like apocalypse stories. I like alien stories. I’m even kind of a sucker for romances between young people from time to time. I just was so disappointed that Rick Yancey seemed incapable on every page of delivering a product that was smart enough to entertain me. Creatively, he failed, falling back on tropes like the single compound or the lying compound leader or the training regiment or the specialized computer program that maps personalities to figure out who’s special or the unique bomb that can take it all down or the drones in the sky.
Even if I wasn’t tired of those story elements, his writing is beyond incompetent. The guy almost never describes settings. The story takes place in Ohio, and I could almost never visualize where the characters were. I’m from Ohio! Beyond that, he doesn’t seem big on describing anything in general unless it’s a thought that Cassie or Ben has that directly conflicts with a thought they just had. Every once in awhile I got hair color, allusions to soft skin, soft hands, boys and girls that smell “nice” or “like perfume,” people that were crying, dead people that smelled bad, rooms that were dark, beds that were soft, sirens that were loud, but the shape and structure of things - no clue. He’s the kind of writer who didn’t seem to have the attention span to really think things through. There are 91 chapters spread out over 13 sections in this novel, which is a lot of divisions for - I don’t know - a hundred and thirty thousand words?
The plot has an interesting element - aliens came to Earth to destroy people a la Independence Day, but unlike that story, The 5th Wave acknowledges that surely there are uninhabited planets out there that would be resource heavy that the aliens could have consumed without any need for war with humans. So it has the question: why are they here and why did they kill almost everyone? But that is answered fairly quickly. On the first page. The aliens inhabit the bodies of some of the humans. So I assumed that that was their method of colonizing Earth from the start. That Yancey treated the reveal of “digital” aliens as a twist, was super strange. Any other major plot points didn’t make sense. Cassie is separated from her brother towards the beginning and the secret alien army men say it’s because she’s too old, but then they go to a base training a bunch of older kids, kids Cassie’s age, and really it’s the little brother who is exceptional for being far too young to do things like hold guns. The aliens plan there never made sense. Also the aliens tell the kids that some people are secret aliens, which seems like a tactically bold choice, just so that they can get kids to kill non-alien humans for them, which struck me as exceptionally convoluted given that they were capable of wiping out seven billion people quickly. The stragglers needed to be hunted by ten-year-olds? Really? In order to have super-intelligent aliens in a story, they have to do something super intelligent. That’s the essence of Yancey’s problem. Supposedly the title alludes to this super-intelligent master plan, but I’m not even sure what it is. Having kids hunt down people is The 5th Wave? I thought that was The 4th Wave. I don’t get it. So naturally I’m really looking forward to the sequel The Infinite Sea and then the third entry in the series, which I’m pretty sure is called Allegiant.
Ah… I feel almost bad for this novel. Clearly I’m at a point in my life where I’m frustrated by my lack of readership and unpublished status and I look at a book like this and wonder how a writer like Rick Yancey can be successful and then take that rage out on his work. It’s not… that… bad… kind of. Some of the dialogue was amusing. It’s a little braver than some YA stories. But it’s definitely bad enough that I’d advise you to read a random book over this one, so that’s not a good sign. Also don’t read Entertainment Weekly because they called it “remarkable - not to be missed under any circumstances.”
But you know where I was most concerned? It was in the acknowledgement section, after the novel was over and done with. He wrote this about his agent:
“My agent, Brian DiFiore, should be awarded a medal (or at least a fancy certificate tastefully framed) as manager extraordinaire of my writer’s angst. Brian is that rarest breed of agent who never hesitates to wander into the deepest thickets with his client, always willing - I won’t say always eager - to lend an ear, hold a hand, and read the four hundred and seventy-ninth version of an ever-changing manuscript. He would never say he’s the best agent, but I will: Brian, you’re the best.”
This is concerning for three reasons. For one, it’s probably the best written paragraph of text anywhere between the covers. Secondly, this agent is not eager to read the work of his client? This makes me think there was a reason that had little to do with writing skill that Brian DiFiore took on this author as a client. What is that reason? It takes me back to a question I want to scream at my monitor when going through agency websites. Do you even like novels? And finally, even if that line about four hundred and seventy-ninth version is extreme hyperbole, so exaggerated as to be close to a bold-faced lie, the finished product is still unacceptable as a work drafted multiple times. This is two standard deviations below the mean for a first draft of a novel, touched up so there aren’t many typos. Four hundred and seventy nine versions… I read the book in three days. Do we agree that’s an acceptable speed? It would take me 3.93 years to read that many versions of The 5th Wave at such a rate, and quite frankly I’d rather take a bullet to the stomach (hit nothing vital) like Ben, or a bullet to the leg (hit nothing vital) like Cassie, or even a bullet to the head (hit the head) like all the characters who tragically were born without names, faces, or personalities.