An airborne virus passed onto humans from an animal carrier. Pestilence ricocheted off the page, its plosive sounds unbearably loud to my ears. With echoes of the last year pulsing inside my head, I devoured the first book just as voraciously the second time around – then consumed its sequels with equal fervour – albeit experiencing an entirely new sense of dread settling into my stomach. Isolated, my street soundless as everyone else went to work, for a brief moment it felt like Cassie Sullivan’s words could be my own: I’m the last human in the universe. This time it was sitting in my garden, recovering from a mild – but nonetheless nasty – dose of COVID, that I re-entered the fractured, desolate landscape of Yancey’s imagination. I sped through the first book, unnerved and perplexed by its alarming predictions for a few seconds, and then moved swiftly on to the next made-for-screen YA novel in my TBR pile. Back then, my Instagram handle was still – which, rather embarrassingly, I only rectified a few months ago. I first encountered The 5 th Wave as an overeager preteen, caught up in a slew of post- The Hunger Games releases that promised disconcerting visions of apocalyptic futures, bundled with ‘which-basic-male-love-interest-will-she-choose-this-time?’ romances. Most striking of these impossible choices are the moments in which the books’ female protagonists – Cassie and ‘Ringer’ – reckon with the preservation of their humanity Chloe Bond
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |