The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey
Genre: Dystopian, Aliens
Published by: Penguin Books
Pages: 316
Format: Paperback
Rating: ★★
Series: The 5th Wave (#1)

The Infinite Sea has been sat on our shelves since it’s release, and finally one of us has gotten round to reading it! After finishing The 5th Wave I was really interested to see how this series would progress, as we didn’t get an awful lot of answers. You may remember that in my review of The 5th Wave I said I wanted more Ringer, and what d’ya know? Ringer’s POV makes up at least 1/2 of the book!

After the shocking events of the first book: the teens escaping, Evan not necessarily escaping from the wreckage and Cassie and Sam being reunited, I have to say I was expecting more to happen.

There’s quite a lot of repeated narrative, where we get half the story from Ringer and then maybe Cassie will fill in the blanks, so there’s quite a bit of back and forward. Ben was seriously injured from the events in the last book, so he’s not as active (and not as much of the comic-relief) anymore, and his conditions restricts the teams movements. Yup, the basically spend the entire book in an abandoned hotel, and it’s as dull as you can imagine.

That’s probably a bit too harsh, considering Ringer has a lot of excitement and development in her sections, but they’re wildly different and distant from the other plot line that it feels like a whole new story interspersed throughout another, jolting you from one narrative to another. Ringer’s POV was no doubt my favourite because although her story paralleled Cassie’s from the first book – except she has Teacup as her ‘little sister’ instead of younger brother – her sections introduced new characters and fleshed out the world. She even had a love interest! How sweet! With Ben and Evan MIA or out of action most of the time, this definitely ticked the obligatory romance box for this dystopian sequel. We’re still left with a lot of questions, and unfortunately, it looks like we won’t get the majority of the answers until The Last Star, the publication of which I think has been pushed back from 2015 to spring 2016. So we’re still waiting!

A key plot development is slowly revealed through abstracted POVs that describe a young boy who appears on a farm an unintentionally blows up the farm house and everyone in it. These sections foreshadow what’s to come, so we’re not so surprised when later the team have to face similar problems.

Otherwise, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Cassie has very little screen time, as it were, in this book and I don’t want her story/struggles to be pushed aside in favour of Ringer, even though I like them both equally. Also, I have a feeling either Evan or Ben is going to die – they’re both in bad places right now, and I think I’ll place my bets on bye bye Ben (why else would Ringer get a new love interest). It was lovely to see more kick-ass girls, but I really enjoyed the mix of narratives in The 5th Wave, it makes the story stand out from other dystopians out there!

Overall, the pacing was terrible and the characters had very little apart from Ringer, whose sections felt more like the kind of content you’d get in a companion novella. What’s going to happen in the last book, I have no idea let’s just hope it’s all going to be worth it!