Rating: WARTY!
I came to this by way of the movie, which despite some large plot holes, I really enjoyed for a dumb action movie. The novel I liked less and less the more I listened to the audio book version which has not one, but two narrators one for the female 1PoV and one for the male. First person is bad enough when only one person is doing it, but you multiply the mistake when you admit to its weakness and have to add a second, third, fourth, whatever, PoV. I do not know why authors are so addicted to it. I can only ascribe it to chronic laziness and lack of imagination.
Here's the major flaw: 16-year-old Cassiopeia Marie Sullivan is shot in the thigh by a sniper. She's bleeding out and lying under a car trying to stanch (not staunch, but stanch, authors please note) the blood flow with a tourniquet (if you apply a tourniquet BTW, please realize that you are acknowledging the loss of the limb on the distal side of it). Despite her panic, her loss of blood, and her fear, this youngster calmly observes and analyzes every single thing in detail. No, I'm sorry, but you just kissed off realism, credibility, and my faith in your ability as a writer. We're told to write what we know, but that's bullshit. No one really does, nor should they - or us.
Personally I don't require that an author be shot in the thigh in order to write about it, but I do require that they use some thought and imagination. There was none in evidence here. This was YA at its dumbest, and this is where I started thinking I did not want to listen to any more of this. What convinced me was reading some reviews from people I follow, and their take on what was coming next is what persuaded me to say-onara...! Apparently this is really just a rip-off of Stephenie Meyer's The Host, and I have zero desire to read anything Stephenie Meyer ever writes, even if it's written by Rick Yancey instead.
The main character is known as Cassie. How many times has this name been over-used for a main female character? I'm starting to feel as nauseated by it as I am by 'Jack'. I refuse to read any novel which has a main character named Jack precisely because it is so prevalent and as to be in need of the urgent attention of epidemiologists. The story is the usual 'aliens are inevitably evil and despite there being literally billions of planets in this galaxy alone, Earth is the only one worth stealing'. These aliens are as retarded as you can get. They have been surveilling us for six thousand years, yet only now, when in all of those six thousand years we are best able to defend ourselves, do they decide to start a war with us?
For reasons unknown, instead of starting with the third wave and severely depleting our numbers with a deadly plague, they start out with an EMP even though such a thing is not guaranteed to completely disrupt society and even though critical military targets and matériel are EMP defended - which they ought to have known after 6K yrs of watching! I guess they're not so smart after all, but it's easy to see why a 16 year old American, raised on a diet of dumb-ass YA romance novels, would not have the intellectual wherewithal to understand this much.
So the EMP purportedly destroys all things electrical and electronic. The second wave is purportedly perpetrated by dropping metal rods, twice as heavy as the Empire State building on cities. Such a weight has fallen on Earth many times. Not in modern times, but the Barringer crater - the mile-wide one in Arizona, USA - was made by such a weight hitting the Earth. A metal rod would burn-up significantly, and break up in the atmosphere - something Yancey apparently forgets, and a metal rod dropped form the ionosphere carries nowhere near the kinetic energy as a meteor coming in from deep space.
A single such rod would, though, still make a significant impact, and destroy a city, but it would not wipe out the planet. A host of them hitting every major city begs two questions: where are they getting all this metal, and why are they taking an action which would effectively destroy not just humanity, but the entire planet if enough of these were dropped, making it entirely uninhabitable? And why go to the trouble of manufacturing neat two-thousand foot long metal bars rather than simply attach mass drivers to asteroids and direct those at Earth? None of this makes sense. But they are alien, Maybe they're imbeciles? Maybe they're merely teenage hooligan aliens out having a joyride? Whatever they are, they're in no way smart.
This is Yancey's biggest failure. What is the end-game here? Do they simply want to destroy a planet? Why? Do they merely want to wipe out humans? Why? And if so, why not do it with disease, leaving the infrastructure intact and the planet still habitable? If they hate us so badly, why let us develop for six thousand years before starting in on us? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. This is the start of a series - one more YA series I will not be following, but if they're such advanced engineers and technologists, why not bio-engineer Venus or Mars, both of which would be more habitable than Earth after they're done spreading disease and dropping steel dowels on us!
After the Pointless EMP and the tsunamis induced by the dread 'turds of rebar', we get the disease, which doesn't even get a scientific name. It's the bird poop disease! LOL! Yes, this is what the author wants us to believe: Ebola, engineered to be airborne, and delivered via bird poop, ravages the entire population, killing 97% of us. No, even Ebola isn't that efficient, especially not delivered in bird poop. Why not simply aerosolize it and spray the planet from orbit? None of this makes any sense. Either that or the aliens are, once again, morons.
Next, the aliens inhabit humans! If they can do this, why did they not simply do it from the beginning before they rendered the planet uninhabitable by disrupting nature, and causing a firestorm and dust cloud which would have brought on a "nuclear" winter and killed off pretty much everything that lives? So we have:
- EMPeeing
- Rebar none
- turds of birds
- alientrusion (aka silence is the new human)
Watch the movie instead. It's still dumb in places, but it's a lot tighter and better written. You can tell it's a decent movie because critics almost universally panned it. That's how I know it's worth a look - movie critics are elitist morons! Ringer/Marika is the best character in the movie. The book is a waste of trees. Maybe it was written by evil aliens....
