We spend all of this second book holed up with our group of characters, waiting for the next awful thing to happen.

The invasion is still underway, but not much has changed. In a most literal sense, it is: Going by my physical copies of both books, The Infinite Sea is about 150 pages shorter than The 5th Wave. The loss each character experiences, especially Cassie, is enormous not just for the character, but because of what it means for the entirety of human life.Ĭompared to all that, The Infinite Sea feels small. Humans yearn for companionship, but safety lies only in isolation. Safe havens turn out to be hell on earth. Trusted adults betray in horrible, mind-breaking, soul-damaging ways. As seen through the eyes of our POV characters, the destruction is devastatingly huge, yet also intimate in that the impact of the invasion is highly personal. Part of what really impressed me in The 5th Wave was the epic scale. But at the same time, the story somehow feels narrow, almost claustrophobic. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in what happened in The Infinite Sea. Does this help broaden the view of life after the invasion? Not really. In The Infinite Sea, the perspective expands to include chapters narrated by several other characters. Each has his or her own intense story to tell, with a unique viewpoint on the events unfolding. In The 5th Wave, our main three point of view characters are Cassie, Ben, and Evan. (The rats are important - more on this later.) Our little band of survivors is hunkered down in an old, abandoned motel, waiting for whatever comes next, listening to the rats in the walls. The Infinite Sea picks up pretty much right after the big, blow-out ending of The 5th Wave. The story focuses on a handful of survivors, each on their own, trying not only to stay alive themselves, but to save or sustain the people they love. Over the course of an apocalyptic few months, 98% of Earth’s population has been killed in all sort of horrifying ways. In The 5th Wave, the subject matter is nothing less than the destruction of the human race at the hands of alien invaders.

I’ll try not to go into a tremendous amount of detail, but if you prefer to know nothing about what happens, well, here’s another good time to look away.Īnd that concludes the housekeeping portion of this post. KINDA SPOILER-ISH ALERT: There are some elements from The Infinite Sea that I’ll have to talk about in order to write any sort of review.

(Better yet, go get a copy of The 5th Wave! It’s good.) Events from The 5 Wave will be discussed! So, need I say it? If you haven’t read The 5th Wave, now would be a good time to look away. SPOILER ALERT: This is the follow-up book to The 5th Wave. This is the second book in a series, so here come the warnings:

The infinite sea book