Melodramatic, Action-Packed, Jumpy
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 with subtle notes of humor, but occasionally he just goes for it and a character starts spewing lines that sound like they're coming straight out of a trailer for a summer blockbuster. Cassie declares:
"If I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield." (24.27-24.28)
And how about this, from the section on Evan:
His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran. (31.53)
Even Ben talks about "the battlefield of his heart." (63.3)
That's an awful lot of battlefields.
In a book filled with nearly nonstop action, lines like that can feel a little over the top. And trust us, there is a lot of action. This is one exciting page-turner of a plot, which makes sense given its subject. (Again: alien invasion.)
The author also builds excitement through the structure of the book, which jumps between narrators. Cassie and Ben don't just have separate points of view—they're in distant places doing different things. At the end of Chapter 24, we're with Cassie, who's on death's door. We turn the page and bam: "Call me Zombie." (25.1)
Wait. Who the heck is Zombie?
That was a rhetorical question. (We know that Zombie is Ben.) The point is: the story's disjointed nature keeps us wondering what's going to happen next.