The 5th Wave (by Rick Yancey)

Rick Yancey’s The 5^th Wave has gotten buzz. Lots of buzz. In fact, so much so, that it’s been likened to The Hunger Games. Now, besides having a 16-ish female protagonist, the two books don’t really have all that much in common in terms of plot. What is obvious, though, is that The 5^th Wave is a book with mass appeal, just like The Hunger Games. I mean, it’s not a revolutionary tale, there’s nothing really innovative about it, but maybe it’s the type of book that comes at the right time, who knows?

I’m not going to give away too much of the plot here. Let it suffice that it’s like Stephen King’s The Stand (love this!!) meets Ilsa J. Bick’s Ashes. The Hunger Games  also didn’t have the most original of plots and much of its success was because Suzanne Collins managed to fuse together some crucial elements to come up with this explosive story at the right time: the Harry Potter and Twilight wave had come and passed and now there is a Hunger Games wave that will eventually also pass. Will the same thing come true for The 5^th Wave? Only time will tell of course, but I can say that it’s really obvious it was written to have that instant (not too critical) mass appeal (also marketing… seriously, I heard numbers like $750,000!!).

And even though I read the book in no time (Yancey of course is a gifted writer, so that should come as no surprise.), I can’t say, that I was wowed by this book the way I was after reading the Monstrumologist series. Monstrumologist had that something more, that indefinable thing in a book that you instantly recognize when you come across it, but that’s so hard to pinpoint. It had horror and humor, and there was Dr. Warthrop and Will Henry, character depth, great adventurous plots, and it was so refreshing, and there was a definite and clear mark of a very gifted author at work. And I knew that The 5thWave wouldn’t be The Monstrumologist, but I’d hoped to see that spark as well: maybe in the characters, or maybe in the writing, or maybe in the setting… but I can’t really say that it was there.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I liked reading it, but there were definitely a couple of instances where I went…ouch…  For one, I wasn’t really sold on the multiple point of view narration. I thought it sort of took away the attention from Cassie’s story, who I was definitely interested in. Second, and probably more disturbing than the multiple POV thing was the love story setup… First of all, Evan: just no, he’s creepy, the way Edward Cullen is creepy, so: stalkerish. So that’s a definite no.  But, second, there’s a whole love triangle being set up and I swear to god, WTF, get done with the love triangles already.

Anyway, I love a good Science Fiction story once in a while, and if you throw in deadly virus thingies, well, that’s fine too. I think Yancey did a fine job mixing together some classic (or cliché…po-ta-to, po-tah-to) SF tropes, ready to be adapted to the big screen in no time (seriously, that’s how it reads), but I think I’m more impatient to read The Final Descent than I am to read the next installment of The 5^th Wave… (which I will also read, of course!).

Midwinterblood (by Marcus Sedgwick)

Two souls who long to be reunited through time is in short what Marcus Sedgwick’s Midwinterblood is about. It all starts on the mysterious Blessed Island in the year 2073 with journalist Eric Seven visiting the island and intent on writing a story about a place where apparently no children are born and people are rumored to live forever. On Blessed Island he meets a young woman, Merle, who he feels strangely drawn to although he doesn’t quite know why. At the close of the first tale, the reader ends up with more questions than answers, questions that are slowly answered by going back in time… seven times, until we get to the beginning of their destined love.

As per usual, Sedgwick’s prose is sparse and seemingly simple, which gives it its unsettling and haunting feel that most people call “gothic” (and after all, this is not just a book of love, but also one with quite a lot of violence, blood, death…). Somehow, Sedgwick always manages to give his books an almost poetic quality and Midwinterblood is no exception to this. I’m sure that Sedgwick will be accused of trying to outsmart himself with his attention to structure, genre, language and mood. But that’s not taking into consideration how engrossing this book (and many other of his books) really is: you just can’t stop reading and that’s the mark of a true artist right there.

Any Sedgwick book needs to be savored rather than devoured, though. His atmospheric prose is of the type that lingers. Blending the contemporary (e.g. the use of present tense alternated with the use of past tense for the narration of the 7 tales) with the traditional (these stories are what gothic horror tales would have been like at the heyday of “the gothic novel”!), he is so unlike many present-day “fantasy” writers, who churn out formulaic fantasy fodder. Sedgwick, on the other hand is – to use Aidan Chambers’ words – a true author and not a writer and he’s obviously not concerned with pleasing a certain type of audience, but rather in producing a work of art. Revolver, Blood Red, Snow White, Midwinterblood… all of these share this common urgency. And it works! It works for kids, it works for teens, it works for adults!

Light (by Michael Grant)

It seems the cat is suffering from Gone fatigue…  Leaving a year between installments just didn’t seem like such a good idea. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still finished this book is record time, but it was more of a “let’s see how this ends and we’re over and done with it” kind of thing, than a “Wow, what a great and earth-shattering conclusion this really is!”

If you’ve made it till Fear – the previous book – you’re obviously going to read Light, so it’s not as if Michael Grant will lose any readers because of this book, but I doubt he’ll make any new fans either. Somehow the fights, the explosions, the violence… all of it doesn’t seem as grand anymore as in some of the previous books. The utter evil that Penny seemed to be in Fear, for instance, is somehow lost now. The only real “villain” is Gaia – the gaiaphage – but (and I blame this on Gone fatigue – she (or it) s no longer as convincingly bad as she was for instance when Caine or Lana were under its spell. Now that the gaiaphage is ‘out in the open’, so to speak, the evil that comes from her seems…expected, and her wanting to kill all and everything just for the sake of it, without any other obvious plans for what comes after… well it’s a mute sort of evilness.

Also, all the fights and near misses are just that: another fight, and another explosion, and people are just running around from Perdido Beach to wherever the gaiaphage might be next and then they fight some more, and run some more, and… you know, what was once über-electrifying (“wow, he/she fights like that, how neat is that!” or “you have got to be kidding me, killer mutant worms?????” and edge-of-your-seat excitement , is now almost normal (even the fact that some beloved characters die!) and yes, I hesitate to say it… a chore to get through until you get to the end game.

And actually, when you think about the end game and the ultimate fight… for a lot of these characters there was no conclusion, and as a result this whole last book even seemed anti-climactic, which is a weird feeling to have when your main villain is defeated, right?

Oh, one final note. The cat bought Light in a Waterstones store in Canterbury (England). Waterstones apparently got a bunch of signed books. So yeah!

Shadows (by Ilsa J Bick)

When writers set out to write trilogies or other series-books, they tend to forget that people often read other books in the period leading up to the publication of the next one in the series. Michael Grant has a tendency to forget that, Veronica Roth forgot it too…and now Ilsa J. Bick has also forgotten there are so many other books out there. So often you get that confused feeling when you start reading that second book , especially when there’s no reminder whatsoever about what happened towards the end of the previous book. That’s OK, though…if you have the book at your disposal (which lots of readers just don’t).  But if you do, you can just have a look at the last couple of pages. If not, you quickly read a few online summaries or reviews and you’re all set to go. Grant’s Gone books and Roth’s Insurgent both grabbed the cat after about 10 pages again, but Ilsa J. Bick just didn’t do that at all…not even 230 pages into the novel, when I just called it quits.

Shadows was just too damn confusing from the get go and there is one main reason for that (besides getting no heads up about what happened at the end of Ashes): the multiple points of view and the myriad of characters that are thrown at you in a short span of time. Reading Shadows is a friggin’ chore. And if there’s one thing you don’t what your book to be it’s a chore for the reader to get through. It’s completely incomprehensible that there wasn’t an editor or an assistant-editor or anyone at all who pointed this out to Bick: “hey, I think you might be losing more than half your readership here… Tone it down on the characters, or at least flesh them out a little before you let them get into the action and the gore all the frickin’ time!” As a reader you have no time to connect to any of the characters because before you know , we’re someplace else, with another character that you don’t know, don’t know what their relation to Alex – the purported protagonist – is.

Despite the fact that Ashes was clearly a book with an immense flaw (namely the entire 2^nd part of the book that was set in Rule), at least what you got was a consistency in the voice. In Shadows there’s nothing of the sort. It’s just one ugly complicated confused heap of action, action and more action.  There’s hardly any sort of continuation with regards to the previous book (in terms of character development, that is) because there’s never a point in the book where I dunno…nothing happens and there’s some chance to catch your breath as a reader and to reflect on what’s going on with the main character(s). Oh, the cat is sure the action and gore scenes are pretty well written, but she just felt herself skipping them because “OK, I get it, gore, gore and more gore, let’s get on with the actual story why don’t you? Or maybe some character development, if it’s not too much to ask?”

At the end of Ashes the cat postponed her judgment, primarily because the first half of the book was absolutely stellar: great sense of place, good pacing, interesting characters. The second half seemed to have been written by a completely different writer. Unfortunately Rule and its inhabitants play an important role in Shadows and since the cat didn’t care one bit for those characters, she’ll gladly give the rest of this series a miss.

P.S. Did I mention it’s about flesh-eating zombies?

Pandemonium (by Lauren Oliver)

Pandemonium is the 2^nd book in Lauren Oliver’s dystopian Delirium trilogy. It’s no secret the cat didn’t much care for Delirium, because she found it too much a waste of Oliver’s talent and too much of an easy marketing ploy to hop onto the dystopian bandwagon… but since it’s a trilogy, we were stuck with Delirium for 2 more books, and Pandemonium doesn’t really leave much room to breathe either. We’re thrown smack into the middle of the action, which makes it absolutely necessary to brush up on your Delirium before you delve into this sequel.

Pandemonium is divided into two storylines: Then and Now. In Then we learn about Lena’s time in the Wilds right after she’s escaped Portland. She has to deal with the fact that Alex didn’t make it, and the harsh circumstances of life in the Wilds. In Now, Lena seems to be back in her old oppressive society (in New York this time), but she’s clearly been hardened by her experiences in the wilds and she’s undercover, working for the rebels. In the Now storyline Lena ends up being ‘taken’ by Scavengers (also society outcasts, but not like the resistance Lena’s been staying with) together with a boy called Julian Fineman, who’s a token for the DFA (Delirium Free America). In the Then storyline we learn about what it takes for Lena to end up being the girl who can go undercover for the resistance: a girl who’s lost her love Alex, a girl who had to struggle to get out of her love-less society in the first place only to end up in a place where love is not key, but survival is, and surviving is harsh, survival means running, means fighting, means overcoming everything you thought you’d overcome already by escaping.

It’s refreshing to read how Lena – the dull and passive character – is capable of growth and change in that respect. Not only has she learnt that being passive will not save her, she’s also learning how to live in a world without Alex, in a world where she has to get into the middle of the action, not a world she just gets thrown into because of the ‘love for a boy’. No, it’s all about Lena and her survival now. I liked the emotional yet strong Lena of Pandemonium much more than the meek and placid Lena of Delirium. The interaction that Lena has with the other characters – both in Then and in Now – comes off as a lot more realistic and is consequently more believable than the feelings of Lena & Alex in Delirium, mainly because there was never any buildup to these feelings in Delirium. In Pandemonium you get a reasonable justification for what Lena feels and the way she interacts with the other characters. So in terms of character development, the cat much prefers Pandemonium – up until the last page, the last word even of the book, which – even though it was predictable as hell (love triangles in dystopias and all that, … :::sigh::: why oh why???…)  – just felt as a complete disappointment.

In any case, reading Pandemonium was a much better experience that Delirium was – even despite the total copout ending – none in the least because of Oliver’s sumptuous writing style. Lauren Oliver has a knack for the descriptive and the emotional in her language, and yet again it works a charm. So far, though, Delirium pretty much ‘fits the dystopia formula’… which is for fans of the genre two big thumbs up, but for as many other readers a big letdown. Why would you want to do everything that other sets of books also do?