The Last Star

Read all 3 paperbacks back to back. Loved the way each flowed into the next. Really hate when a series spends the first chapter or two rehashing the previous and Yancey did not do this. I found all 3 books disturbing on so many levels. After reading volume one I was depressed on the side of hopelessness with no escape or redemption in sight. That pretty much sums up how each book affected me. Yancey's underlying philosophy throughout was based on what seemed to be the possible future of human kind regardless of aliens. He shares a brutally real vision of what we are doing to each other and to the earth. Somehow "Silent Spring" comes to mind.
I highly recommend all three.

"V: How do you conquer the unconquerable?
Q: Who can win when no one can endure?
P: What endures when all hope is gone?"

The Last Star is the final book in The 5th Wave series. Things pick up not long after where book two leaves off with Ringer believed to be missing and everyone else holed up in the Silencer's bunker planning out their next steps. The entire story takes place over the last four days of Earth. Once all the teen-aged angst and arguing has gotten out of the way, it turns into an action packed, intense four days as our heroes finally decide they will go to any length to try and save humanity.

While the story is told from five points of view it is Cassie and Ringer who are the main stars. It is Ringer who discovers what is show more really happening and understands how the alien program works while it is Cassie who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save humanity purely for the love of her brother. And that right there is the overall theme that was started in book one and hinted more at in book two: Love conquers all. Aliens cannot understand human love, that love is humanity's most redeeming feature and there's no program they can devise to counter it.

I think Yancey learned from his the first two installments that multiple first person points of view are confusing. While this style is still followed, headers have been provided at the beginning of each chapter when the perspective switches so you know exactly who's point of view it is. I'm still not a fan of this format but this helps dramatically with the POV confusion.

My main disappointment with the book is the loss of atmosphere. The previous two books had a certain tension. Things were eerie, creepy, you didn't know who to trust and it gave the story a distinct edge. That feeling is gone and I miss it. Also be warned there is a god awful sex scene. The writing is simply terrible. I have spoiler tagged a quote. Click at your own risk. "My hands roamed his body, an undiscovered country, which henceforth I shall call Evanland. Hills and valleys, desert plains and forest glens, the landscape pockmarked with scars of battle, crisscrossed by fault lines and unexpected vistas. And I am Cassie the Conquistador: The more territory I conquer, the more I want."

It's not a bad ending to the series. In some ways it felt a lot like the ending to the Divergent series to me. I'm pretty sure this has left some fans angry. It feels authentic to the world setting so in that way I found it satisfying and somewhat moving. All questions are answered, lose ends tied up and there is a bit of hope for those who survive. show less

Some series, the writing becomes better and the plot richer, and the reader can watch the author's skill develop as she reads through the books in the series. That outcome is rare and wonderful, and right now I can only think of one series that actually follows that pattern, and it's written by J. K. Rowling.

The 5th Wave, like most series, would have been great as a single, standalone novel, but someone (publisher? agent? a figure with a pitchfork perched on the author's shoulder?) encouraged the author to keep on going. Sure, if you stopped with one, the story wouldn't be tied up in bow, and the readers would be left wanting more, but sometimes wanting more is actually better than getting more, especially when the "more" is show more disappointing.

The disappointments in this one were macro and micro.

Macro- Yancey seems to have found a formula he liked---get the characters into an impossible situation, make the situation even more impossible, have someone show up in the nick of time and save the day in a rain of bullets and shrapnel---and he played that on repeat. By the end of The Last Star, I stopped trying to keep track of all of the one-hit wonders who show up, and I'm not sure I could even tell you the difference between Grace and Constance at this point. For a world where almost everyone's been killed, people sure stumble upon one another a lot. Without giving away any spoilers, the "truth" Yancey reveals about the Others makes no sense, and it seems like Yancey was figuring it out as he put words on the page. And that's fine, if that's your process, but his editor should really have given him some guidance before the book was published.

Micro- Here's a scene: Ben gives Sam a locket. Sam says, "What's this?" Sound familiar? Sure it does, because the exact same thing happens in the first book. And it's pointless here anyway because in this book, it's a total red herring. It never shows up again. Gah! In addition, Yancey has a tendency to repeat himself, sometimes using the same words to describe two different scenes or two different situations or the same situation from the eyes of two different characters thinking the same words. When it's coming from the child soldiers, I get it. It's boring, but I get it. But from the other characters it just seems like Yancey stopped trying.

I know it has to be a lot of effort for an author to sustain his interest in the world and characters he's created long enough to write a series, no matter how great a premise underlies it. It requires a lot of attention and emotion from both the author and the editor to make sure the final product is as good as it could be. I don't think The Last Star is as good as it could be, and that irritates me.

Not every series is going to be Harry Potter, but not every series should be a series, either. show less

Note: Some spoilers for the first two books in this series, which together make up "The 5th Wave Trilogy." No spoilers for this book.

I hope that you, Reader, aren’t someone who thinks that a young adult trilogy about an invasion from outer space can’t possibly be a sublime, sweeping meditation on the meaning of life. Rick Yancey will prove you wrong.

This story is told in alternating points of view, but for most of the saga the narration is by Cassie Sullivan, age sixteen when “the Others” come to Earth. These alien invaders have attacked the planet over the past months in successive waves.

The first wave was a massive electromagnetic pulse, and the second was the creation of a huge earthquake and tidal wave that eliminated show more everyone in coastal areas (i.e., over 40 percent of the world’s population). The third was a virus, spread through birds, killing an estimated 97 percent of those left after the first two waves. In the 4th wave, the few survivors do the alien’s work for them by attacking each other, because it’s hard to know whom to trust. Rumors abound that the aliens look like humans, or have taken over human bodies. But no one knows the truth. And no one knows what the aliens want or when the next wave will strike. As this third book begins, we find out what the 5th Wave will be. It will take place in two parts, in which “[t]he human footprint is about to be wiped clean.”

Cassie is “sentimental and immature and self-absorbed beyond belief” as well as “cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.” She also has a huge heart and “true, undiluted courage” that comes from faith, hope, love, and even a sense of humor. She accepts pain, because it allows her to know joy. These qualities provide her with the perspective to take in all that has happened and transmute it into a plan of action.

As it happens, the quest to destroy mankind runs into some roadblocks very much personified by Cassie: hope, courage, and most of all, the power of love:

“The fundamental flaw in humanity was its humanity. The useless, baffling, self-destructive human tendency to love, to empathize, to sacrifice, to trust, to imagine anything outside the boundaries of its own skin - these things had driven the species to the edge of destruction.”

Or as Cassie says in her typical sardonic manner: “Aliens are stupid. Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don’t get it. They still don’t understand. Dumbasses.”

It may sound as if Yancey, in his paean to outstanding aspects of humanity, is invoking trite references to overused concepts, but he manages to elevate these “roadblocks” into an eloquent and transcendent defense of humanity. In this passage, perhaps my favorite in the whole trilogy, Cassie distills the essence of humankind, while contemplating the importance of her little brother’s stuffed bear:

“I press my lips onto that nasty stuffed animal’s head. Really neat that human beings conquered the Earth, invented poetry and mathematics and the combustion engine, discovered that time and space are relative, built machines big and small to ferry us to the moon for some rocks or carry us to McDonald’s for a strawberry-banana smoothie. Very cool we split the atom and bestowed upon the Earth the Internet and smartphones and, of course, the selfie stick.

But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature’s most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.”

Notice how the author renders the mundane marvelous by the poetic quality of his descriptions. Here, Ben, now called Zombie, is thinking about his last car:

“Before there was Zombie, there was this kid named Ben Parish who worked on cars with his old man on Saturday afternoons, the last being a cherry-red ’69 Corvette, his seventeenth birthday present from his dad, a guy who really couldn’t afford it and pretended it was for his only son, but they both knew the truth. Ben’s birthday was an excuse to buy the car, and the car was an excuse to spend time with his son as the clock wound down to graduation and then college and then grandkids and then the retirement home and then the grave. The grave leapt unexpectedly to the front of the line, not before the car, though; at least for a few Saturday afternoons, they had that car.”

At first, when Cassie thought she might be the last person alive on earth, she had written in her journal, “I am humanity.”

But then she meets other survivors, including Evan Walker, an alien entity downloaded into a human body. He and other “infested” people have enhanced physical properties, which “turn their bodies into finely tuned weapons.” Their designers assumed: “Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.”

In most instances, this theory worked, but in the case of Evan, something went wrong; his human side prevailed over his alien consciousness: “He fell in love, and love is the only weakness.” (Once again, Cassie has her own unique way of characterizing Evan: “ . . . the self-sacrificing, idealistic, alien-human hybrid asshole.”)

Clearly, along with the constant terror gripping everyone and pervading the story, the books still manage to be funny and poignant, seamlessly combining teenage concerns with Big Survival Issues in just the way a teen might react to whatever arises. The characters are really likable and expertly nuanced, constantly battling questions of fear, trust, and even faith. But this not by any means a “religious” tract. In fact, to the contrary, the characters are convinced even if there had been a god, that god had deserted them. One is reminded of the lyrics of Don McLean's "American Pie":

"And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken. . ."

And yet, some of the most poignant moments in the books come from when characters intone the classic children's bedtime prayer, emphasizing this verse:

“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
When in the morning light I wake,
Show me the path of love to take.”

The last time you read it in the book will induce buckets of tears.

Discussion: The plot is impressively clever, invoking a variety of literary allusions both old and new. But what is most consistently striking is the dialogue and the character of Cassie. She is such a typical 16-year-old, as when she covets the clear skin of another female survivor even while her world is being destroyed. She expresses a poignant sorrow for the woman she used to dream of being one day:

“With my eyes closed, I could see her walking down a wooded path in Vermont, a place she has never been and will never go, and the leaves that embrace the trail sing arias of bright red and gold. And there is a big dog named Pericles running ahead of her in that self-important way of dogs, and she has everything she ever wanted, this girl - no, this woman - nothing left behind, nothing left undone. She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn’t allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it.”

Again, one thinks of the lyrics in "American Pie":

"We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance..."

It’s so tragic to read, and yet, in the end, Cassie becomes more than even her dreams: she becomes, in a way, the sum of everyone, the representation of humanity in all of its good and bad traits, its weaknesses and strengths.

Evaluation: One wonders if Yancey was inspired by the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself.” The messages in that poem and even many of the images are similar to what is conveyed in this book. But Whitman was writing in the late 1800’s. This trilogy, with its references to Starbucks and gaming and legos and technology, is a song of the 2010’s, and just as soaring and memorable in its own way.

Yancey doesn’t pander to any happy ending tropes that so often mar the credulity of apocalyptic stories. He is as honest and unflinching as his characters, and as full of love for humanity as they are. Highly recommended!

Note: This is not a standalone. show less

I was excited, but very tentatively so, to read this final installment of The 5th Wave series. Although I enjoyed the first book, the second ("The Infinite Sea") was...well, not a continuation I liked. So how did I think things wrapped up? I feel as if "The Last Star" was a solid mix of my feelings on the first two. Some good, some disappointing, and my rating falls firmly in the middle with 3 stars.

NOTE: The rest of my review contains spoilers for the WHOLE SERIES, and MAJOR SPOILERS for "The Last Star".

To start, I was SO glad the pace of the series finally switched back to the faster, fluid style that was found in "The 5th Wave" (T5W). Things actually happened, unlike the story line in "The Infinite Sea" (TIS) , which I felt dragged show more and lacked the punchiness of the first. I felt anxious at times, whereas my reading of TIS left me reading it simply so I could be done with it.
Also, similar to TIS, there were multiple points of view, but again, I liked them here in last book, mainly because the speaker was identified at the heading of each chapter. This wasn't so in TIS, and made for very confusing reading. I truly feel like this is a book series that benefits from the multiple POVs. Getting to be inside the mind of feelings of so many characters really built a more complete feeling of the universe and what was going on in different areas.

There were a handful of things that didn't work for me in this book.
I don't want to go into a huge, detailed explanation of each, but I'll mention a little thought on them:
Sam- In T5W, I could see him clearly as a 6 year old. He acted and spoke more like one, and it made him so very real to me. But somewhere between the end of T5W and the final book, Sam felt cold. I understand that he was put through military training, saw people killed, and was TRAINED to kill, but is there no shred of child left in him? I don't know...I just think Sam was lost somewhere, and I'm sad that he never showed emotions about Cassie dying. He just seemed to accept it and move on, and I CAN'T see a child that young being okay with the last member of his family dying so violently.

*Ben and Ringer- ???? Um. WHAT. Where did that ending come from? Is there ever going to be a YA book that ends with a pregnant girl content to just be single? Their whole relationship felt so sudden, and it didn't feel believable.

*Character development: making a character (like Cassie) go from being an average teenage girl to a teenage girl who fights aliens and shoots guns does NOT EQUAL character development. This goes for many of the characters in this cast, expect for probably Ben. The characters just got more tough and "edgy", but there was so little genuine change in any of them. Attitudes, actions, viewpoints, thinking processes- there was a real lack of development in these areas.

*This is a big one for me, and it's probably the driving force behind me not giving "The Last Star" and full 4 (possibly even 5) stars:
HUMANITY.
Throughout the whole series, the characters, especially Cassie, reflects on what it means to be human. This is a huge theme of these books. It begins way back in book 1, when Cassie writes in her journal that she thinks she may be the last human alive, and that makes her humanity:

"Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.”

And the theme continues:

“How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.”

“The minute we decide that one person doesn´t matter anymore, they´ve won.”

“Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.
I am humanity
He crawled.
I am humanity.
He fell.
I am humanity.
He got up.”

Throughout all the books, Yancey places so much emphasis on this: we are HUMANS. If you take away our humanity, there is only a human-shaped shell left. And you know what? In the first book, I felt this. I felt Cassie's emotions and fear, Ben and Sam's, all of them: they felt so real to me, and their voices were strong and loud even if they were scared. They persevere, the fight, they cry, and they HOLD ON to their humanity. They are so insistent on fighting back and keeping Earth, and there are moral dilemmas that must be faced.
But then...this is watered down. Greatly.
Reflections on "I am humanity" just become, "Wow, I miss McDonalds and milkshakes and TV and cars, humans will never be the same". Sure, longing for this things would be normal, but I feel as if the whole message of "humanity makes humans HUMAN" was lost. Everyone felt so cold and heartless for large chunks of time, and their willingness to kill (almost mindlessly) became stronger. What happened to the passion for morals, for fighting for a cause without senseless killing, for LIVING and not just surviving?
My thoughts are a little jumbled here, but I just wanted to see more HUMAN EMOTION. I wanted to see the characters struggle with their actions, like in T5W. I wanted more HUMANITY, the thing the aliens were so determined to strip away. At the ending, I think the aliens succeeded a bit. The characters felt much less human.

All in all, it was a decent conclusion. I didn't completely do it for me, but given how things have been set up for the readers, it worked. I'd be interested to see what Yancey produces next, although I'm not chomping at the bit to get my hands on it. show less

That ending! It broke my heart! Such a bittersweet ending! Great conclusion to this trilogy. This last book is filled with action (which I love), sacrifices, and amazing writing. Once again, I find myself repeating over and over "that is such a great quote." I loved seeing what was going on with each of the characters but the one downside with multiple POVs is I get so interested in what's happening with one character, I get sucked in and then it switches to someone else and I'm just like "wait, go back! I need to what's going to happen to them!" But then I get sucked into what's going on with the other character and then it switches on me again, so frustrating. Also I was still confused about the whole "are they aliens? Are they not?" show more for most of the book, right up until the end. I wish that part was more clear early on. Those are the 2 downsides to this book which is why I gave it a 4 stars but otherwise I really enjoyed it. show less

The Last Star picks up right where The Infinite Sea left off, Ringer, newly enhanced with the 12th system, has run away from Camp Haven after Teacups death while the rest of the gang (Cassie, Evan, Ben, Sam, Poundcake and Megan) are holed up in the dead Silencer, Grace's safe house. Each side is plotting their next move. After learning that the Others have a massive air strike planned to take out all major cities in the world in four days time, the pressure is on to not only reunite with Ringer and Teacup (unaware of her death) but to also plan an attack on the mothership to blow it up before it has the chance to blow up the world. Easy peasy right? Not quite. Of course the gang runs into all sorts of trouble, Silencers, capture, show more missile strikes, deception and more along the way. Will Cassie and her gang of misfits be able to stop the release of a tidal wave of bombs? Or will time run out before they are able to accomplish their mission? And who will they loose along the way?

Overall, I think Rick Yancey really did all the characters justice in the nail biting conclusion to this trilogy. All the characters sub plots were well thought out and developed, true to their personality and identity. His writing style is so rich in detail and fluid, it was such a naturally easy and engaging read. What I really enjoyed about this read was that everything wasn't neatly wrapped up in a little bow and delivered to the reader. It was harsh and painful at times, but was honest and believable. Life doesn't get wrapped up neatly in 350 pages and this novel really captured that truth.

If you haven't finished the book and plan on it- don't read ahead- SPOILER ALERT!

I'm not gonna lie and say I was thrilled that Cassie died in the end, or pretend that it wasn't a major blow when reading the book, but I understand enough to know that it had to happen. Once she told Ringer goodbye and to take care of Sam, I knew her end game and it hit me hard. Thanks for making me an emotional wreck Rick! At work no less (shhhh don't tell my boss). Deviating from a normal YA plot perspective, I felt it really did Cassies character justice that one of the main points of drama wasn't a love triangle or some star crossed (literally in the case of Evan Walker) lover angle. Sure it's there, giving the plot some added drama and points of contention but it isn't the focal point. There is no fairy tale romance in store at the end for Cassie and Evan (or Cassie and Ben). I enjoyed the last few chapters showing life with Marika, Ben, baby Cassie, Sam, and Megan. I was especially thrilled that Evan didn't die a heartless, soulless "Other" but was restored, however painful that must have been. I would have hated if our last glimpse of Evan was what Vosch made him into. Overall I felt Rick did an amazing job with this trilogy and, as always, was blown away by his superb writing style and dedication to his characters. show less