The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancey

For anyone looking for a great adventure/thriller – perhaps to replace that hole left by The Hunger Games – then look no further than The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. It seems a bit cliché to describe it as gripping or edge-of-the-seat, but that is exactly what this book delivers. It’s a little bit sci-fi, a little bit horror, a little bit post-apocalyptic, but mostly it’s just about a family trying to survive, trying to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

Cassie’s world has been destroyed. Four waves of terror spread across the world when the aliens came. First the lights went out. Then tsunamis spread across the land. The third wave was pestilence, the fourth the silencers. What will the fifth wave be and when will it come? Separated from her family, Cassie is living day by day, living by the principal of trust no-one. Which seems pretty sensible, except that sometimes you have to decide to put your faith in someone, sometimes you need that someone to help you survive. But is Evan the right someone for Cassie to trust? He saved her life, but is he telling her everything? Can he help her find her little brother?

Rick Yancey’s telling of The 5th Wave is done in such a way to make you 95% certain that you know what’s going on, who to trust, who to doubt, and right from the very beginning we know what the 5th wave will be, even if Cassie doesn't. And yet that 5% somehow takes on a disproportionate weight, making us question what we believe to be true, to want to shout out at Cassie and warn her whilst also making us want to believe the opposite. And thus, tension abounds, the heart races, and you just have to simply keep turning the page, and the next page and the next page and the next page.

Ironically, Cassie has never met an alien; as far as she knows they’ve never set foot on the planet, never shown their faces. Instead they wreak their havoc from above, watching, waiting, playing. This makes it seem so much more about humanity, about how we respond to apocalyptic situations, how we choose to treat each other, how we find safety or how we gang up against one another; what we’re willing to sacrifice. This is a story that has been told time and time again, yet Yancey imbues it with a fresh sense of adventure and trauma and tension. And, given as this is a concept that has been told time and time again, what does that say about our enduring fascination with the real subject matter: ourselves?

Whether you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, The Passage, I Am Number Four, The Host, or none of the above, read The 5th Wave. Whether you’re young or old, or even older, read The 5th Wave. It’s brilliant.

What's Left of Me, by Kat Zhang

Eva is in hiding. Only her twin, Addie, knows that she is still alive. But Eva and Addie are not twins in the way you might expect: in their world, everyone is born a twin. Every body is born with two souls residing inside, sharing one body, taking turns to walk and talk. But in Eva and Addie’s world, it is also normal for one of these two souls to slip away, to pass on, leaving their body for their twin. This ‘settling’ is supposed to happen when they are five or six years old, but Eva and Addie never settled. Now fifteen, every day Addie pretends to her friends and family, to the world around her, that Eva doesn’t exist anymore. Because if they find out she’s lying, they will - at best - lock her up, and at worst, hunt her down and forcibly remove Eva from their body. Because hybrids - bodies where two souls remain - are the enemy. They are considered wrong, dangerous.

What’s Left of Me is Eva and Addie’s story. It’s another title to file under the heading of ‘teen dystopia’, yet it’s fresh and different. The basic concept reminded me of a mix of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host (where an alien soul takes over and shares a human body with a human soul), and Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (where an evil faction are experimenting on the separation of humans from their daemons), but the treatment reminded me strongly of Ally Condie’s fantastic dystopian love story, Matched. For this is where the strength of the story lies, and where the dystopian factor comes in: government conspiracy and manipulation; the discovery that everything you’ve been taught is a lie, the discovery that everything you trusted and believed in is wrong.

Kat Zhang has done a great job of putting her idea into words. Writing two different aspects of one person, or of two souls in one body, could have proven difficult, but her approach makes it easy for the reader to distinguish between Eva and Addie, and you can even see the different characters that not only these two girls have, but the different characters of the other hybrids they encounter as well. Referring to one body as ‘we’ must have kept Zhang on her toes, but how other people in the story use ‘I‘ or ‘we‘ or ‘they’ also gives the reader lots valuable clues about the people encountered and the events going on. Early on she raises the question over the potential problems of two people living in one body, making me wonder whether the government’s stance on hybrids is actually a wise and sensible one, but she also raises a lot of moral ideas too. Is it murder to remove a co-sharing soul? Just because the body still exists and still has a soul within it, doesn’t change the fact that an equally valuable soul has, essentially, died.

Eva and Addie are both fighting for their rights, for their freedom, but how far are each of them willing to go to get what they want? And how far are others willing to go for what they believe in? Zhang sets a good pace, with lots of tension and action as well as the moral aspect, though I did get a tad bored - or not bored so much as bogged down - around two thirds of the way through, where I started to lose track of where the story was going or how it was going to progress. Progress it did, although not at quite the same rate with which the story began. Things are tied up quite nicely at the end, whilst simultaneously leaving it open for the story to continue into part two of what is currently dubbed The Hybrid Trilogy. It’s not as good as The Hunger Games or Matched, but it’s definitely up there with the better dystopian stories, and bound to be a hit with the teenage audience.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Its not very often that I re-read books. Not because I don’t want to, but because there are so many unread books out there. Thus, re-reading is usually reserved for when I’m unwell and need that comfort of something familiar, something that I know will work out alright in the end - Harry Potter or anything by Eva Ibbotsen. This week, though, I have been re-reading Veronica Roth’s Divergent.

What is Divergent about? I always have great difficulty trying to summarise Divergent for my customers at Waterstones. It’s set in a future world where society is comprised of five factions, each one characterised by the ideals it subscribes to. Citizens are born into a faction, but when they turn 16, they undergo an aptitude test to determine with which faction their temperament more closely adheres to. It’s the choice of a lifetime: to stay with their family or to change allegiance, and risk never seeing them again. Tris’s choice is made even harder; her aptitude test reveals that she is a divergent, that she has no single overriding aptitude. How can she possibly know which faction is going to be best one for her? And, even worse, if anyone discovers she is divergent, her life will be forfeit.

Clearly, there’s a lot more to this book and this world than the above. The boundaries between factions, instead of maintaining peace, as was the original intention, are breaking down. The factions are supposed to make everything black and white, but Tris is set to discover that the truth is usually grey. Factions, instead of leaving each other in respectful peace, are starting to criticise one another, to demand change. Is war on the horizon? And Tris’s chosen faction is definitely not what it seemed. People are out for power, and they aren’t going to let little things like morals get in their way. 

This is a novel written for teenagers, and so incorporates all the teenage standards and coming of age stuff: drama, action, a bit of romance, and learning to question what, in childhood, what was easily accepted. It’s great escapism, and that’s one of the reasons why I chose to re-read it. Another reason is the dreamy Four, who I defy anyone not to fall for. Also, the follow-up to Divergent is released in May - Insurgent - and I was having trouble remembering exactly what happened at the end of Divergent. I thought about just re-reading the last few chapters, but caved and decided I needed to learn about Four from the beginning all over again!

Verdict? It was as good this time around as it was the first time. There are a lot of teenage dystopian-style books on the market at the moment and this is definitely, in my opinion, one of the better ones. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got a crush on Four. It compares favourably with Susanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, as well as Ally Condie’s fantastic Matched. They all tackle similar issues, granted - the role of government in determining the minutae of everyday life being a significant theme - and to someone who isn’t that bothered about teenage books they make look similar, because they tackle similar ideas (the utopia/dystopia boundary, governmental power and corruption), but each one has does have an originality rather than just hashing out the same basic storyline. And, even though I’d read it before, Divergent still got my heart pounding just as hard this time around.