Review-The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1) by Rick Yancey

I can truely say that I have been severely disappointed, which is a real shame since I went into this book thinking that I would at least like it and maybe that it would be riveting, fast paced, punchy with very loveable characters. Needless to say, unfortunately, this was not the case for me and I have seen that from the general community here on Goodreads, the next two books get worse, and as such, for now at least, will not be continuing on with this series. Now, please be aware that all thoughts, opinions and ideas are my own and are by no means factual, so please do not be offended by anything I am saying, they are all the opinions of a fellow bookworm.

There were parts of the book that showed some sense of promise(hence the two star and not one), yet for the most part, I did not enjoy it. From the beginning, I found the narration from Cassie’s point of view to be extremely annoying and many things that she mentioned were merely here rambling off her own thoughts rather than having the story actually progress, which is backed by lots of backstory which aside from the alien invasion, was her crushing on this guy in her class and even at the end of the story, she is still thinking about a conversation that they had five years ago.

Then, the most creepy romance ever happens when she gets rescued by this person and then explicitly mentions that he saw her naked, but, because of the fact that he helped her and he is this handsome dude - cue the teenage angst and instalove. I thought that it might have actually been an ok romance if the two characters actually got to know each other and we saw their relationship grow, but it ended up being the most creepy thing ever which was a real shame.

I also did not find anything that was necessarily overly original, which ok fair enough, that is becoming harder and harder, but the way that it was executed was not exactly the best. The book was far too long considering the amount of story that was told for my tastes and not nearly exciting enough for way too much of the book and it only really picked up at the end and that might have been because I was too stuffed to pay any attention anymore and was simply rushing to get this book out of the way to read something that I might hopefully enjoy.

Something that threw me off was the sudden change of point of view(POV). What essentially happens is that for every new part, there is a change of POV, which did threw me off, because the character voice was still then rambling about random stuff and also that there was no indication of a change of character, and also the author thought it would be a good idea to have several chapters dedicated to the mind of a five year old.

So while I think that the book did have the potential to be something great(though may already consider it to be something great), it fell short of its aim due to its romance, sluggish pacing and quite irritating narration. It was not something I enjoyed personally, though I know many have, and will continue to like this book. 3.5/10