The thrills of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meet the moodiness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in this gripping young adult novel of survival, desperation, and humanity.

Sixteen-year-old Cassie Sullivan is alone. She didn’t used to be alone. Only a few months ago, she had everything you probably have right now: A family. A best friend. Homework. A crush.

But that was before the Arrival, when an alien mothership appeared in the sky and wiped out 97% percent of humanity in four concussive waves of world-wide terror. Cassie is left alone in the woods of Ohio with a teddy bear, an assault rifle, and a promise to keep to her little brother Sammy, who was bussed away by military forces just before the fourth wave crashed down on the remnants of Cassie’s life.

To a certain extent, The 5th Wave evades easy classification. The brutal sci-fi setting also carries deep seeds of romance, and irreverent humor peppers Cassie’s grim mentality like teenaged shrapnel. For a grand-scale post-apocalyptic novel, The 5th Wave doesn’t cover much physical geography. Cassie’s world has shrunk down to the few miles of hushed, abandoned earth which she can walk on her own without being murdered by an alien sniper.

Instead, the story instead spans considerable creative distances. The 5th Wave carries readers through the clinical exactness of Rick Yancey’s extra-terrestrial invasion in vivid detail, each wave more terrifying and palpable than the last. This is hard sci-fi turned devastatingly human, and the range of Yancey’s imagination will keep readers as on-edge as they are impressed.

But it is the emotional space traveled through the novel that really makes The 5th Wave special. The path between hope and despair – between “giving up and getting up,” as one character says – is well-trod by the end of the story, but filled with enough pitfalls and surprising divergences that every step feels new. The story is both that of Cassie’s struggle to survive and a (literally) cosmic struggle of opposites. Love and hate, trust and suspicion, anger and serenity – all machinery of a war which exposes the dissonant truths of what it really means to be human.

Yancey’s skill is such that his philosophical passages often read like action, and high-tension battle scenes become almost meditative in their reflection. He imbues Cassie with a bracing honesty that reflects both her age and her circumstances, and weaves together the stories of other survivors so deftly that you may forget who you are rooting for.

By turns heart-pounding and contemplative (but never – pardon the pun – alienating) The 5th Wave will thrill you, chill you, and challenge you to keep the pages turning fast enough.