Summer Reading: The Host

All praise to Stephenie Meyer, for once again gathering me into her web of riduclous plots that make you feel like an idiot when you say them out loud but characters that you can't help but fall in love with.

Unlike Twilight, The Host is not written for teenagers, that's not to say that teenagers couldn't read it, although it is a bit thicker and psychologically complex. It deals with the same themes as Twilight, including what exactly defines a person as "human."

The Host takes place in the not so distant future, a world where a race of altruistic aliens calling themselves "souls" have invaded earth and taken up residence in our bodies. They believe that they are doing right, settling our beautiful and rich planet with their ideas of perfect harmony and balance will erase human war and destruction. However The Souls find themselves overhelmed by human emotions and desires.

Meyer takes similar characters to Twilight and inserts them in this different scenario and of course, this is the woman who gave us one of the best love triangles of the past ten years, she doesn't disappoint on that end.

Wanderer, our narrator is currently possesing twenty year old Melanie, who before she was captured was on the run with her thirteen year old brother Jamie and the love of her life, Jared. Wanderer has lived on eight planets before earth and is highly admired by the others in her community. Melanie is strong willed and determined to reunite with her brother and lover, and refusing to surrender her consciousness to Wanderer. Without giving away too much, they form an unlikely partnership and find a small pocket of human resistance where Jared and Jaime have been hiding out. Although the humans of this compound have a policy to kill any souls who come to them, Jared and Jaime refuse to let anyone kill Melanie, even though they believe her to be dead. Over time the community grows attached to Wanderer, especially one of the men Ian, who falls for her, much to Mel's objections. This twisted love square between four people in three bodies, grounds the story emotionally.

The story is slow to get started and the book is very long, over 600 pages, and for the first hundred I had a lot of trouble getting invested. But the pay off is absolutely there, especially when Wanderer starts to realize her feelings for Ian. The relationship between Melanie and Wanderer is extremely interesting, Wanderer acting as the Ego and Melanie as the Id. (See, I got something from Intro to Psych) until they start to come together. Meyer's requisite happy ending is there, and as usual there are incredible smaller characters to pepper the landscape and make the story something more than just some kind of science fiction melodrama.

Once again, I recomend it, but just be ready for the first 150 pages of introduction before the real story starts.