

The psychopathic bad guy and Ringer engage in psychological gamesmanship. The other main plot of The Infinite Sea focuses on Ringer, a hard-nosed human girl who breaks from her pack to find their missing 7-year-old pal Teacup and winds up in the clutches of the Others' evil commander Vosch. The bad news, however, is that Evan has led another one of his kind to them, a tall blonde named Grace with the looks of a Nordic model and the obsessive killer focus of a Terminator.


He's the hunky farm boy with superhuman abilities who also happens to be one of the aliens in disguise, though he is a good guy with major feelings for Cassie. The good news is that Evan Walker, who was presumably in the camp when it was blown up, turns up alive. "It's like they want a fight," one character opines. Some in Cassie's bunch yearn for the innocent days of school bells and soggy tater tots at lunch, and nobody can quite figure out the Others' endgame. And in The Infinite Sea, how the youngest kids are being used in disturbingly destructive fashion by the alien "Others" becomes very apparent.Ĭassie and her bunch hole up in a nearby hotel to nurse injuries and figure out their next move before a freezing Midwestern winter takes them out before the Others do. She and her kid-turned-soldier compadres - including high school crush Ben Parish, now a take-charge guy known as "Zombie" - gained an important win against the villains with the explosion of Camp Haven, where human tykes were being housed and brainwashed for mysterious reasons. With shifting points of view among its ensemble cast, the sequel makes the most of its themes of evolution and humanity while also highlighting two very tough and determined female protagonists and tapping into Yancey's ocean of creativity.Ĭassie Sullivan was the primary teenage heroine of The 5th Wave, searching for her little brother after a series of disasters - electromagnetic pulse wave, coastline-crushing tidal waves, a plague and outer-space organisms taking control of human hosts - wiped out most of mankind. The Infinite Sea impressively improves on the excellent beginning of the trilogy by focusing on the emotional turmoil faced by pitting complex youngsters against a massive and overpowering extra-terrestrial menace. By comparison, his follow-up is an intimate character study. Rick Yancey's young-adult sci-fi novel The 5th Wave set up an expansive apocalyptic alien-invasion scenario.
