The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm checking it out, yo. I mean, it was supposed to be this big thing and I was kinda meh on the whole concept of dystopias about when this was all over the feeds, so I just didn't do it.

Then.

But now is a brand new day.

And today is all about the mass deaths. Let's do it in waves, each one so much more impressive and deadly than the last. Now let's add aliens and make them the perps behind it all.

Now make it a survival novel with a smart and logical and ruthless girl who's set to do whatever is necessary to survive.

Honestly, I thought this was pretty much a 5 star novel well past the mid-point. The style and pacing and the character and the dire feels were pretty awesome. I liked her family and I loved the effect that her brother going away had on her.

So where did I lose interest?

With the boy. Sorry. Also with the possibility that her little bro might be alive and the subsequent plot.

After all, what struck me as fantastic in the first more-than-half novel was the sheer "alien-ness" of the aliens, the disregard for us, their total commitment toward getting rid of us at all costs. I didn't want to ascribe a human-ish motive to anything that could go that far out of its way to destroy us, from flooding to making us bleed out almost universally. Even just letting us take ourselves out was fine. Doppelgangers, too. They wanted our world as a resource, but not us upon it. Got it.

I probably would have been great with The Road ending. I just didn't want to see a real romance situation. Not here. Not like this. There just seemed to be so much potential for learning and discovery, even trusting others again. There was some of that, but it still felt like a waste with the big action scene we did get.

Am I getting picky and personal about this? Possibly. It's just that so many great premises these days just have to go the way of dinosaur plots. And for what? A cheap sex thrill? At the end of the world? Meh. Even Saving Private Sam was pretty predictable. Maybe I just didn't want a happy-ish ending with such much perfect dark setup.

Whatever happened to tragedies, yo? I expected tragedy. Horrors get this right. This could have been a great horror/sf.

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