Hi All,
Now, as I am an avid reader, I love books and so, this is a new thing starting. This book of the week is "The Host" By Stephanie Meyer.
Aliens invading the bodies of humans isn't a new plot
device, but who ever stops to think about the body-snatcher's point of
view? The Host gives us the chance to experience this unique
switch in perspective: the book opens as the alien called
Wanderer (so named because she has lived the life-term of eight
different hosts on eight different occupied planets) is inserted
into the body of Melanie Stryder, a renegade human recently tracked down
and captured by the Seekers. When an alien Soul is
placed into a new human Host body, that's supposed to be that: the Soul
will have access to the previous occupant's
memories, but the body is the alien's to control. Unfortunately, things
don't go so smoothly for Wanderer; Melanie has
stuck around inside her head, and she is not happy about sharing her
body with an occupying Soul. She fights back by
filling Wanderer's thoughts with images of Jared, the man that Melanie
loves. Wanderer knows that she should turn this
information over to the Seekers, but soon she comes to love Jared as
well, and rebels against the idea of his possible capture.
United with Melanie by this common emotion, and pursued
by a Seeker who's convinced she's hiding something, Wanderer strikes
out into the desert, following cryptic clues Melanie's uncle left to
guide them to a hidden rebel cell of humans. However,
by cooperating, Melanie and Wanderer have made themselves untrustworthy
to both of their peoples. Fueled by their love for
Melanie's human connections, they can no longer stay with the Souls, but
the humans -- including, heartbreakingly,
Jared -- fear and distrust the alien in their midst. Wanderer must
fight for acceptance, not only for Melanie's body,
but also for herself as an individual. She must also deal with her
conflicting emotions of a developing love
quadrangle: her body -- Melanie's body -- remains strongly drawn to
Jared, while her Soul is slowly falling for Ian,
another of the conclave of humans.
I have conflicting feelings about Stephenie Meyer's work.
On the one hand, I frequently react poorly to her message, morals,
and attitudes surrounding gender and relationship issues, often finding
myself anywhere from mildly annoyed to seethingly
angry. On the other hand, MAN can she tell an absorbing story.
Regardless of my intellectual reaction, I invariably
find myself completely sucked into her books, blindly turning pages (in
this case, changing CDs), totally oblivious to
everything else in my world, but desperate to know what's happening in
hers. Objectively, this book could have to be
about a third shorter; Meyer is not a particularly concise or elegant
writer, never saying in one sentence what she could
hammer at for three. Still, once you've been sucked into the story, it
doesn't matter: even when not much was actually
happening, I never had the impression of the story dragging.
The Host is being touted as Stephenie Meyer's
first "adult" novel, although I'm hard-pressed to figure out why this
one is Adult while the Twilight series is Young Adult.
The narrators are the same age (well, Melanie is;
Wanderer is obviously a few thousand years older), there's not any more
violence in one versus the other, and sex is actually
mentioned less in the ostensibly more "adult" book (although it occurs
"on screen" at the same frequency -- i.e.,
never -- in both). Nor did I find the themes of The Host to be
particularly age-specific. There's a meatier moral
dilemma here than in the Twilight series, but it's not so
complicated as to exclude most
teens. Suffice to say, fans of one
will almost certainly enjoy the other, regardless of age.
While the main issues of identity, body vs. mind, and
ownership are handled well (with the exception of a few arguments
about whether Melanie's body "belonged to" Jared or Ian, which creeped
me out), some of the same issues surrounding relationships
and gender relations that plague the Twilight series are
prevalent here as well. First, Meyer writes relatively passive
women, which is unfortunate, considering that teen girls make up the
vast majority of her fan base. Wanderer is stronger
than Bella, but she still doesn't have a whole lot of agency, and
there's a lingering whiff of "whatever the men think
is best" that rankles.
Second, and I realize that this puts me in a very small
minority: I don't like Edward (from Twilight). Meyers
tells us he's this wonderful, perfect, incredible specimen of the male
sex and we're supposed to believe it, even when
she subsequently shows him acting like an immature, borderline-abusive,
incredibly arrogant asshole. The Host
has some strong echoes of this; its weakest part is the early stages
where Melanie convinces Wanderer to fall in love
with Jared. I didn't buy that this process would be as quick and
effective as it was, but even once I suspended my
disbelief and accepted that Wanderer was in love with Jared, not until
the very end of the book did I ever believe
that Jared deserved it. But, Meyer says he's perfect, and therefore
he's perfect, assholish behavior or not. Since
the Wanderer/Jared relationship was only one among several, it wasn't
quite so annoying, but there's still a noticeable
disparity between what we're shown and what we're told.
But, intellectual and feminist disagreements aside, The
Host is a vivid, absorbing, and compellingly readable
story, told from a unique perspective by a convincing narrative voice. Overall, I
think sci-fi fans (who don't mind a hefty
dose of romance) and romance fans (who don't mind a hefty dose of
sci-fi) are both likely to enjoy this book, and
of course Meyer's preexisting fans are going to eat it up.
Also, sometime in the near future, The Host will be on the big screens with the young and upcoming star Saoirse Ronan playing the part of Wanderer/Melanie. I am curious to see whether the movie makers will live its to potential and follow the book.
Love Selena
Tender and tasty, this ginger & five-spice pork is sure to
be an instant hit! 
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