REVIEW; The Last Star
8:05 pm
“We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone.”
~
The Last Star - Rick Yancey
Publish Date: 24th May 2016
Publisher: Penguin
Genres: Dystopia, Romance, Young Adult, Survival, Sci-fi.
Pages: 338
Format: Paperback
Goodreads // BookDepository
SYNOPSIS:
The enemy is Other. The enemy is us.
They’re down here, they’re up there, they’re nowhere. They want the Earth, they want us to have it. They came to wipe us out, they came to save us.
But beneath these riddles lies one truth: Cassie has been betrayed. So has Ringer. Zombie. Nugget. And all 7.5 billion people who used to live on our planet. Betrayed first by the Others, and now by ourselves.
In these last days, Earth’s remaining survivors will need to decide what’s more important: saving themselves…or saving what makes us human.
WARNING: Spoilers!
The Last Star is the grand finale of the 5th wave trilogy by Rick Yancey. Having read the first two books in this series earlier this year, I was eager to find out how the series would wrap up, with lots of questions on my tongue waiting to be answered. What I did not expect was to be greeted with characters that didn’t stay true to themselves, little atmosphere, awful romance and still an unexplained plot.
*sigh*
The 5th Wave’s most interesting and redeeming quality was the suspense and atmosphere created by the constant doubt and fear of, well, everyone. No one could be trusted and that was reflected by each character. Yet in The Last Star, that atmosphere was destroyed. It felt in-urgent. Mid action sequence, Cassie was more intrigued by Ringer’s straight nose and her crooked one, than the helicopter that they were landing in, surrounded by enemies. Like???
The plot was still unexplained, but from what I understand, they destroyed the human race because they wanted to??? Why? What was the alien’s actual motivation to do it? However, in The Infinite Sea, I did like how it was humanity destroying itself because it does stay true to the nature of man (and I like twisted things) but then as I read this final book, aliens were still the driving force and I don’t know how I feel anymore.
The writing style is irritating. Yancey jumps from third person to first, and gives a five year old a more mature and insightful look on everything than he could possibly have, regardless of what he had been through. It doesn’t flow like it did in the other books, and felt more like a dystopian series than the dubbed sci-fi.
The romance was so incredibly irritating, I grew to loathe reading Cassie or Evan’s POV. They have zero chemistry. Every time Cassie mentioned Evan’s damn eyes I wanted to stab out my own;
“Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt.”
Euuuughhhhh
The characters were not themselves. I loved reading Cassie’s POV in the first book, but over the progress of the series I grew to dislike her character more and more because she changed. She was not the snarky, brave girl who went into a military compound to save her brother, instead she whined about everything and then sacrificed herself stupidly, when she could have used the knowledge she gained from the thousands of memories, and perhaps timed bombs to go off when the pod would be delivered to the alien ship. Like, duh? At least she had the guts to get rid of rogue-Evan, through electrocution might I add, which I find was her sole redeeming moment in the book.
Ringer and Ben were the only characters keeping me from putting the book down. Ringer was bad-ass and took no shit from anyone, which I admire, but I don’t understand why Yancey thought it was a great idea to make her pregnant? A bit dramatic I think, and she was also in a relationship with Ben at the end? And Ben, as much as I love him, was not as intelligent as he has been throughout the series? And Yancey seemed to joke a lot about Ben’s inability to keep his sister alive, even though her death was his sole driving force behind each of his actions throughout the entirety of the books????
Hmmm..
Yancey also contradicted his characters; Ringer frowned at Ben for burying Dumbo and then proceeded to bury the squad she killed. Cassie doesn’t want to have sex for the sake of sex, then she has sex in the heat of the moment (ft. The WORST description ever. Was that supposed to be romantic? because it was scarring.)
“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.
His chest heaved: a subterranean quake that rose to the surface like a tsunamic wave.”
*shudders*
In conclusion, The Last Star was a disappointing ending to a great idea and first book, lacking in relevant plot explanation, having incredible character imbalances and plain awful descriptions (especially romantic descriptions).
★★★☆☆ - 2.5 STARS
Love, Natalia
xx
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