The 5th Wave Analysis

An alien race known as the Others recently touched down on Earth (no, not really—don't panic) and so far they've been the worst guests ever. Let's say a stranger showed up to your house uninvited...

Most of the book is narrated in the first person, tag-team style, between Cassie and Ben. For most of the book, these two characters are unaware of each other's existence. (They were high school cl...

Like a lot of young adult (YA) literature, The 5th Wave is heavy on young characters and light on adult characters. Maybe that's because all the adult characters are either a) dead or b) evil. No o...

You know that saying, "Live each day as if it were your last"? Well, it takes on a whole new level of meaning when the world is ending. In The 5th Wave, the author creates a tone of urgency through...

Call us crazy, but there's something a teeny tiny bit melodramatic about an alien invasion. The melodrama we're referring to, though, is in the language itself. Yancey's prose is mostly even-keeled...

In The 5th Wave, the end of the world is occurring in stages otherwise known as "waves." (You can't rush a good alien apocalypse, people.) The first three occurred before the book began. The First...

If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans. –Stephen HawkingNothing...

The end of the book provides some closure: Cassie and Ben have fulfilled their sacred mission of saving Sammy, the aliens' main military base has been blown to bits, and Cassie and the gang are hea...

The good news? In a lot of ways, this book is super-easy to read. Yancey isn't interested in impressing us with a bunch of fancy metaphors and SAT dollar words, and the basics of what happens—ali...

So You Think You've Been Invaded by AliensThings haven't been going so well for the good citizens of planet Earth. First a huge alien ship appeared in the sky. Ten days later, murder and mayhem ens...

Rick Yancey is a huge fan of American Idol. Huge. (Source) Yancey worked for the IRS for more than a decade. He even wrote a book about it. (Source)The author confronts critics who write bad revie...

Like a lot of books on the young adult literature shelf, The 5th Wave features a strong connection between first love and apocalypse. (It's totally a coincidence, we're sure.) Over the course of th...

The Bible (1.4)Cassiopeia (mythology) (2.8)Poseidon (2.8)Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (5.29)The Grapes of Wrath (5.29)Sylvia Plath (5.29)Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends (5.29)Moby-Dick...