The 5th Wave - I LOVED IT!

So, are you catching on to the theme of books lately?  Girl lives in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian society. Girl sees many flaws in the society despite her friends and family's urgings to keep things the way they are.  Girl begins to question and fight back against the powers that be, putting herself in grave danger...girl finds love along the way.   Yes, I love these books too, so I wasn't expecting much more from Rick Yancey in The 5th Wave.  Girl surviving in a post-apocalyptic world?  Yes.  And that's about where the similarity to the growing trend in teen writing ends.  Cassie must survive in a world taken over by aliens, but not in the way you see it in the movies...you know, where the mother ship comes and little creatures come and either eat all of your Reese's Pieces or try to scalpel your brain out.  These aliens are taking out the human race in waves. The first wave took out all electrical capabilities (imagine planes just all falling from the sky in one instant), the 2nd wave is a giant tsunami, the 3rd wave is a horrible plague and the 4th wave includes human-like aliens hunting and killing any remaining humans they find.  Cassie and her 5 year old brother manage to survive all of these waves.  The rest of her family? Not so much.  When Cassie lets her brother go with some soldiers to what she is told is a safe haven, she reluctantly lets him go but promises she will come back for him. When she realizes that all is not how it seems and that her brother could really be in the hands of the "Others", she desperately tries to find her way to him, all the while fending off a sniper who doesn't seem to be a very good shot, meeting a handsome stranger whom she must learn to trust, as well as facing her past in a very interesting way.  I have 2 very active children, so the fact that I managed to finish this almost 500 page book in under a week tells you that it was darn good (and that maybe I was kind of a terrible parent this week). I bought this book with the intention of donating it to my school library, but upon reading it, have determined that it is more of an older teen book due to lots of swearing and heavy violence at times.  The imagery of young children being groomed for war and dying was hard to take personally, but the book was just too good to put down.  I got past that little uncomfortable bit real quick.  I'm taking a little break from the heaviness of the book before reading the sequel, "The Infinite Sea," and am going to read a fractured fairy tale that's been on my radar for a while (review coming soon!).