The 5th Wave and The White Tree

First wave: Lights out
Second wave: Surf's up
Third wave: Pestilence
Fourth wave: Silencer

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Cassie Sullivan feels far from fine. When the aliens came, they didn't send ships that could be shot down, didn't land an army of war machines that could be overcome by plucky rebels or exposure to the common cold. Instead, they just parked in orbit and began to take over. First they killed the power, then they dropped massive projectiles into the oceans and drowned the coasts; then came the plague, and once there were just a few handfuls of survivors, the Silencers. Now, there is a 5th wave, and it might well be the last.

Rick Yancey's novel The 5th Wave takes as its first principle that alien invaders are smart; that humanity will never be able to go toe-to-toe with anyone with the capability to travel between stars. At the start of the story - the first part of a trilogy - no human has ever even seen an alien, just the mothership that has slaughtered billions from afar. The narrative is divided between Cassie (voiced by Phoebe Strole) and her unknowing high school crush, Ben Parrish (Brandon Espinoza.) Cassie is a lone survivor, desperate to find her lost brother and forced to trust Evan Walker, a stranger with abnormally dreamy eyes. Ben - aka Zombie - is a child soldier in the last army of resistance, who must question whether he can rely on his messianic CO Colonel Vosch.

The 5th Wave is a pretty creepy book, with Walker setting new standards for creepy behaviour even post-Twilight and both Cassie and Ben forced to become something far darker and colder than their youth should demand. The child army is especially grim. The earliest sections of the book, juxtaposing Cassie's recollection of the first four waves with her struggle to survive, are the most effective, although Ben's part of the narrative plays well with the reader's expectations for alien invasion. Overall, it's a good set up for the rest of the trilogy, although it is sometimes hard to feel for the characters, so shock-hardened have they become.

The book has been optioned for a film. The fact that Liev Schrieber has been cast as Vosch tells you most of what you need to know about Vosch, while the fact that a Nordic blonde has been cast as the specifically Asian child-soldier Ringer tells you as much as you might care to know about Hollywood.

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The White Tree is the first volume of The Cycle of Arawn and tells the story of Dante Galland and Bleys Buckler, a young scholar struggling with a strange power and his swordslinging bessie struggling with a rather silly name*. Dante has stolen a book, 'The Cycle of Arawn', and through its philosophical and religious discourses learned to manipulate the shadow-force of creation, the Nether. With the outlawed worshippers of Arawn fomenting rebellion, Dante and Bleys are directed to travel to the dead city of Narrashtavik** in order to bring down the head of the order and prevent the release of the god himself from his celestial imprisonment.

The White Tree escalates fast, with Dante in particular going from sneak thief to major player on the world stage in the space of about five months. It's a self-consciously 'ordinary' fantasy narrative, replete with coarse language and common concerns, and its strongest point is the friendship between the two boys (although given the absence of any other female protagonists - the only female character of any note is the antagonist - I was disappointed when the beardless, oddly young looking yet surprisingly well coordinated for his age Bleys didn't turn out to be a slightly older girl in drag.) The reader, Tim Gerard Reynolds, manages the dry humour very well indeed, although its hard to escape the conclusion that both Dante and Bleys are borderline sociopaths who leave a procession of corpses in their wake with only occasional twinges of anything approaching conscience.

Many on Goodreads have criticised the use of modern colloquialisms in a fantasy setting, but I figure what the hell; it's not like they're speaking English. On the other hand, there are a few references to specifically primary world things - most glaringly the Olympic games - which are a bit jarring.

* No, really; it's part of the narrative, not me being snarky.
** Having only the audiobook, I can not swear to the spelling.