Stars: 3.5 
 If everything was good, then nothing would be good. 
 I actually finished reading this book about two months ago - I'm not sure why I put off the review for so long but it does show me that this wasn't a book that I had to let you all know about RIGHT AWAY. 
 I also don't remember much about this book except that I didn't mind it - another indication that it isn't the most memorable thing that I have read. 
 That being said - I liked it and reacquainting myself with it has reminded me that I did like it. I think the main down side of this for me is that sci-fi/alien books are not my favorite to begin with - never really liked the sci-fi genre so I do go into books with that personal preference. 
 Besides me not liking alien books - as far as they go this one had a pretty great plot. The book has multiple POV's which really work for it. One POV is Cass - our heroine. She's alone and the world has crumbled around her after an alien invasion. There has been 4 "waves" of terror in the invasion so far. the 1st Wave was to shut off the power - nothing worked. Planes went down and phones went off. The 2nd Wave was to increase the sea level - millions of people drowned and cities went under. The 3rd Wave was a disease that caused more millions of people to bleed out and die. The 4th Wave was the most interesting - aliens that had been inside host humans suddenly came to life and killing people. It is impossible to tell the difference between a human and an alien. 
 The 4th Wave is what makes this book so interesting - makes the lines between right and wrong start to blur. You have to be suspicious of everybody - you can't hesitate to kill because you might be killed, but how can you not hesitate when you don't know if the person in front of you is enemy or friend? 
 As Cass puts it - the world won't end in a big alien showdown like the movies: 
 That's not how it ends at all. 
 It ends with us killing each other behind rows of empty beer coolers in the dying light of a late-summer day. 
 I have to say that I liked Cass a lot. Yancey finds a way to write in the flash-backs to her past life that really work and give you a sense of who she is as a person. You can feel her sadness and uncertainty at the world. 
 He busted out in tears. Fell onto the path and gave into it, the bigness of it, the big Buick that's parked over you, the horrible feeling that, as bad as it's been, it's going to get worse. 
 Probably the only thing that I didn't like about her was I felt that she was a bit slow on the uptake for some plot points. They're pretty obvious but not obvious to Cass which is frustrating at times. Her story line also gets a little slow in the middle and there's a bit of romance which I found painful and instalovey - I would have liked to keep the romance developing through the whole novel and maybe coming to fruition in one of the later novels. 
 Luckily for Yancey - he put in another POV which helped when Cass's story line was slowing down. Ben Parish was Cass' love interest in the pre-alien invasion days, which I think was a great twist. His plot revolves around him being taken in by the army and trained to go out and kill the people/aliens. Now Ben also suffers from a little bit of "slow to catch up to what is really going on" - but they get there eventually and I love how at the end Ben and Cass finally cross paths and the two POV's become one. 
 On I side note - I really don't think I'll be watching the movie adaptation because of the casting. None of the actors are what I imagined for the characters and I actually really dislike all movies that Chloe Grace Mortez is in..... *sighs*. 
 BUT - I WILL be reading the sequels at some stage.