REVIEW: ‘The Host’ by Stephenie Meyer

Stephe­nie Meyer has tem­porar­ily set aside her vam­pires to give us, adults, a sci­ence fic­tion story. Well, she exceeded my expec­ta­tions because this book turned out to be a solid sci-fi thriller.

The Host, doesn’t employ an orig­i­nal sto­ry­line because to me, it sounded like another ver­sion of the Body Snatch­ers. When I men­tioned the plot of Ms. Meyer’s book to my fam­ily, almost all of them said, Star­gate. I’ve never watched Star­gate but as the say­ing goes, there are no orig­i­nal ideas. Mov­ing on.

In this story, an “alien race” of par­a­sites has taken over the planet, using humans as hosts and leav­ing only a hand­ful of human rebels behind. While humans fought the good fight, in the end, well, they lost.

The main story arc fol­lows Wan­derer, a soul who has been recently inserted inside a human host. Her host turns out to be apart of the human resis­tance and her name is Melanie Stry­der. She died a vio­lent death (only to be healed later as a viable host). After dis­cov­er­ing she was trapped by the alien invaders, she threw her­self down an ele­va­tor shaft.

Melanie makes her pres­ence known to her new host almost imme­di­ately and the two bat­tle with each other for the upper hand. Resis­tant hosts are rare. Need­less to say that Wan­derer con­trols the body but Melanie’s thoughts and mem­o­ries are hard to sup­press. Wanderer’s job is to report any info that she learns about the human resis­tance from Melanie but Melanie makes it dif­fi­cult for her to do so. Wan­derer does know that Melanie left behind two peo­ple she loved most: her lit­tle brother Jamie and the love of her life, Jared.

Wan­derer and Melanie develop a ten­ta­tive friend­ship out of neces­sity since they both have to share one body. Melanie uses what power she has, in the form of dreams and mem­o­ries to gain Wanderer’s atten­tion and sym­pa­thy and draw her into her cause. The tip over to the rebel side isn’t really all that hard since Wan­derer is already feel­ing some­what sym­pa­thetic and guilty about what her peo­ple have done. She starts to suf­fer a cri­sis of loy­alty with her rela­tion­ship with Melanie and strikes out to find the two peo­ple she left behind.

Wan­derer does dis­cover the band of human rebels led by Melanie’s Uncle Jeb and she spends most of the story in cap­tiv­ity with them, only to come out a dif­fer­ent per­son at the end. She becomes a sig­nif­i­cant part of their human com­mu­nity (only after they slowly accept her, most of them any­way) and help­ful in their raids for med­i­cine and food. As for the love tri­an­gle, that was rather weird (and some­what pre­dictable) and I didn’t par­tic­u­larly care for it but she did resolve things nicely.

A lot of Melanie’s mem­o­ries and feel­ings toward Jamie and Jared are shared with Wan­derer aka Wanda (her human name). I got impa­tient with her hav­ing all these feel­ings for Jared because I felt he didn’t deserve it. He was the last one to come around when a few oth­ers were con­vinced (after a brief time period) that she meant them no harm. The first time he sees her, he punches her in the face. Funny, in that her Uncle fig­ured it out (about Melanie still being alive) but Jared was much harder to con­vince and he was allegedly, the love of her life, but he fails to rec­og­nize her.

I think mid­way into the story, another hero was start­ing to emerge and it was the last per­son I would have expected Wanda to hook up with but any­body else was bet­ter than Jared. I won’t reveal his name. Their scenes together were really nice and I looked for­ward to read­ing them. I thought the hero, once he came around like the oth­ers, was a bit too accept­ing of Wanda, because tech­ni­cally, she is a par­a­site attached to Melanie’s brain. I thought the author was over­reach­ing there, in his total accep­tance of her species but it was nice that he could over­look all of that.

After fin­ish­ing this book in two days, I didn’t really take much time after to really digest the story. I will say that the author’s main theme was about what it means to be “human” and we get to see that per­spec­tive, the good and the bad from an “alien point of view”. Melanie was a much more aggres­sive char­ac­ter, some­one I could iden­tify with while Wanda is more self-sacrificing and always will­ing to do the right thing. The story main­tains a nice ten­sion through­out this 625 page story. I had my moments of uncer­tainty about the out­come of these char­ac­ters. I cared about what hap­pened to them, found myself wor­ried for them and forced myself to read the end­ing, just to make sure every­thing would be a-OK (haven’t done that in awhile.)

The body count in here is pretty low. There’s no sex, just a lot of hand hold­ing and kiss­ing. The chem­istry is nice as is the implied sex­u­al­ity, where the char­ac­ters come close but then it’s aborted. Ages 12 and up is the rec­om­mended audi­ence for this story. I found noth­ing inap­pro­pri­ate or overly sex­ual. Your mileage may vary. I’m sure the story had some plot holes, some lapses in logic, a cou­ple of threads over­looked, but despite all of that (if any­thing), I was enter­tained. The sci-fi aspects are low-key so it is a novel more or less for those who don’t enjoy sci-fi. The epi­logue seems to hint at a sequel, too. I’m intrigued enough to want to know what hap­pens next. My grade, a solid B.

The Host by Stephe­nie Meyer was pub­lished on May 6, 2008 by Lit­tle and Brown and is avail­able in hard­cover for $25.99 and ebook for $17.99 at your favorite retailer.