The Host by Stephenie Meyer
619 pages
Published: May 6, 2008 by Little, Brown and Company
Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. Our world has been invaded by an unseen enemy. Humans become hosts for these invaders, their minds taken over while their bodies remain intact and continue their lives apparently unchanged. Most of humanity has succumbed.
When Melanie, one of the few remaining "wild" humans, is captured, she is certain it is her end. Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, was warned about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the glut of senses, 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.
Wanderer probes Melanie's thoughts, hoping to discover the whereabouts of the remaining human resistance. Instead, Melanie fills Wanderer's mind 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 begins to yearn for a man she has been tasked with exposing. When outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off on a dangerous and uncertain search for the man they both love.
This book is legen-wait for it-dary, LEGENDARY! Ahhh, it was just so good! I was so sad that it was over; I don’t think I have felt that way about a book in a very long time, which is surprising. What’s even more astonishing is the fact that I am saying that about this book (do you remember my feelings about Twilight?).
What grabbed my attention about this book was the premise of things taking over a person’s mind/body. Also the fact that the way the setting could happen a few years from now, well that is if souls/aliens invaded Earth. The setting for most of the book is in Arizona, a place I fell in love with my freshman year of college.
The book starts with Wanderer, a soul, being implanted into Melanie. The way Meyer describes Wanderer is almost poetic and reminds me of those feathered seahorses more than a centipede/worm they refer it to in the book. It’s just sad that these souls take over human minds and have full control at least that is what is supposed to happen. But that isn’t what happens in these two women’s case. Melanie is still present in the mind and puts up a good fight by sharing memories of her little brother and the man that she fell in love with, who are still out there…uninfected. Wanderer soon has feelings for them and together they go on adventure to find them. But first they have to shake off Wanderer’s Seeker, who was put in charge of watching her and soon becomes more of a stalker than anything else. I would go on but I don’t want to give too much away, I already described the main events in the first half of the book (that is the one thing I didn’t like about this book is that the first half reads pretty slowly).
I fell in love with all the characters, especially Wanderer/Melanie. You can’t help but sympathize for them both, although Wanderer felt more relatable to me. Stephenie made them feel so real to me that when I was done with the book my heart broke because I already missed them. They became like a family to me, the whole lot of them! I especially miss Uncle Jeb and all his insight. He is probably one of my favorite characters of all time and I wish he was a real person in my life. Another favorite, well favorite bad guy anyway, is Kyle. He is so stubborn and violent that I pretty much hated him from the get go, but towards the end I felt apologetic for hating him so much at the beginning, although he is hard to love.
The love triangle/quadrilateral/spider-web thing is done to perfection in my opinion. It wasn’t overly cheesy or mushy. It was just enough for where you saw how they cared for each other and saw how they fell in love. One of them even made this cynical girl melt a little even. I still feel all twitter-pated about it!
Amazing book, amazing characters, amazing premise, amazing setting, what more could you ask for really? If you haven’t checked this book out, do so soon. You won’t be disappointed.
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 checkers:
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