(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008)
Hardcover, 619 Pages, Fiction
From the Cover: Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed. Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn’t expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind. Melanie fills Wanderer’s thoughts with visions of the man Melanie loves—Jared, a human who still lives in hiding. Unable to separate herself from her body’s desires, Wanderer yearns for a man she’s never met. As outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off to search for the man they both love. Featuring what may be the first love triangle involving only two bodies, The Host is a riveting and unforgettable novel that will bring a vast new readership to one of the most compelling writers of our time.
My Review: Well … here we are again. A book by Stephenie Meyer has once again infiltrated my life and taken it over … and that’s not even a pun. After being 358th in line at the local library waiting for The Host, I finally broke down and asked my sister-in-law if I could borrow her copy. Her signed copy. After signing numerous waivers, taking out an insurance policy and promising my firstborn if I were to damage her copy in any way, she sent the Brinks truck over and I was handed her copy of The Host.
My analysis? It took a good piece of the novel before I was finally able to “get into it” (though part of that may be that I borrowed it during finals week and my brain was divided) but after that initial 200 page hurdle, I was able to race through the novel to the very end. I don’t know what sort of sorcery or witchcraft or metaphorical deal with the devil Meyer has made, but the spellcraft that she weaves in her novels is something that is very difficult to overcome. Again, as with Twilight, it is not Meyer’s plots or her writing or her originality (this story has been done before and by better)—though Meyer’s craft of writing has vastly improved, I will give her that—it is Meyer’s ability to create incredibly believable and lifelike characters that move her Readers through her books at incredible speeds. Once I got past all of the initial exposition and was into the meat of the story and amidst a cast of characters that were genuine, I lost myself in The Host and could not surface until I had finished the book. It took me a week to get through the first 200-or-so pages and three hours to plow through the back 400. I could not put it down.
What I liked best about The Host is that while I thought that I knew what was going to happen by the time I got to the end, I was surprised to find out that I had guessed wrong. There were quite a few plot twists and turns that I did not see coming and that was a pleasant surprise (especially considering how predictable the Twilight series was by the end of Eclipse). The Host testifies to the fact that Meyer has been maturing and growing as a writer and I, for one, hope that this bodes well for Breaking Dawn.
As for the science fiction aspect … I’m a little divided on it. The “body snatching” has been done better in a thousand B-movies and books from science fiction’s Golden Age in the 1950s, not to say that Meyer doesn’t update an old device, but she doesn’t have anything new to add to the established canon. What I did like about The Host was Meyer’s cosmology. She has created a very rich and full universe in which her characters live, and when it is being explained, it is among some of the most fascinating prose that Meyer creates in her novel. She is able to paint these other planets in vivid colors and with such beautiful language that I could almost believe that they existed.
What Meyer’s has created in The Host is an incredible reading experience, and in the end, it doesn’t matter if its Shakespeare or the Body Snatchers meets Sweet Valley High … if you enjoy it while you read it, then read it – and The Host definitely fits that description.
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