Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #738 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-06
• Binding: Hardcover
• 617 pages

Orson Scott Card, author of The Ender Saga
Stephenie Meyer is an amazing phenomenon--out of the brightness of her mind and spirit comes the illuminated darkness of her stories. For no matter how much pain her characters suffer, Meyer infuses the tales with light and hope.

Katherine Neville, author of The Eight
A fascinating, passionate, and unique psychological thriller. In The Host, Stephenie Meyer gives a new and surprising meaning to the phrase `being of two minds!

Ridley Pearson, author of Steel Trapp and Killer Weekend
A fantastic, inventive, thoughtful, and powerful novel. Stephenie Meyer captures characters and handles storyline like a master--a hybrid combination of Stephen King and Isaac Asimov ... The Host should come with a warning label: it will grab you and keep you reading well into the wee hours of night, and keep you thinking, deeply, hauntingly, well after the final word.

Customer Reviews

Soul Survivors
This is an unusual sci-fi novel in that the souls have succeeded in creating a utopia rather than a dystopia. I really liked the originality of this and the idea of the silver souls being inserted into the brain of humans and making them a more peaceful species.
As far as characterisation goes, Jared and Ian have an awful lot in common with Edward and Jacob from Twilight - roaring, snarling, growling and throwing punches at the slightest provocation. Melanie/Wanda is torn between the two, just like Bella is torn between Edward and Jacob. I think Ian could have done a bit less roaring as we are supposed to see him as a gentle character who appreciates the gentleness in Wanda, rather than a fiery, feisty type like Jared who loves the fierce Melanie.
Another inconsistency was the idea that Wanda could only experience a sense of smell for the first time as a human - what happened to her sense of smell when she was a Bear? Then there is the description of her gorging out the soul from a bear with knife like hands - how does this correlate to the delicate operation she describes to Doc at the end of the text, when you have to feel for the nodule? How would she have done that with knife like bear hands?
Still a compelling read for me because I love all the action phrases and knowing what they look like and do. The ending was perfect - I really hated the idea of Wanda going on to reproduce hundreds of silver souls but die herself so was pleased with the lovely, joyous last chapter.

Epic new series for Vampire Author
Renowned for her Vampire love story that began in Twilight it was a bit of a departure with this Sci-Fi offering that's part Stargate part Terminator where the aptly named Wanderer becomes implanted in freedom fighter Mel. Yet instead of letting go Mel mentally fights against Wanderer in order to keep hold of her body so that the two have no choice but to work together to further their co-existance. Wonderfully adaptive, highly interesting and above all a tale that makes you face many questions in much the same way that Stephs other books do. Highly invocative with the discussions between the two principle protagonists (or should that be the singular with it being one body?) and definitely a book to recommend to others that will allow the readers to experience a whole new type of Sci-fi.

Hmmm...
Although often exciting and eventful, The Host grated on me for a number of reasons. Told in the first person by the invading parasite Wanderer (later known as Wanda) the broad strokes of the story are fine. But underneath the quasi-sci-fi elements and the love quadrangle lies a low-grade sexism, some disturbing ideas about sexuality (along the lines of "this body didn't belong to me or to Melanie, but to Jared,") and an awful of lot crying, whimpering and cringing. The men are angry and violent, and the invading Souls are the only ones depicted with any compassion. Not to be too sarcastic, but "have a little humanity" is a phrase this author perhaps hasn't encountered. The Soul's compassion for one another is deeply ironic given their complete disregard for the original owners of the bodies they wear.

We also come across the pervasive, lazy sci-fi element of alien worlds having only a single eco-system (the ocean world, the ice world, the mist world, etc.) Having a planet with arctic, temperate and tropical climates is apparently as much of a stretch as having a single character with multiple motivations. Admittedly the sci-fi is kept to a minimum, presumably so as not to scare the genre-nervous, but the best fiction starts from fact.

This is obviously a pet peeve of mine.

I would not recommend this to any impressionalbe teenage girl as the Wanderer-Jared relationship is very close that of an abused spouse and her abuser. Any relationship that ever involves flinching is not one to base your forming romantic notions on. Other relationships in the book are controlling, and even Wanderer's final decision is disrespectfully reversed with neither her knowledge or consent.

And I almost tossed this out a window when a character expressed the opinion that virtue equals prettiness. My buck teeth and acne mean I torture puppies, obviously.

Having said that, I enjoyed the bulk of it, I wanted to find out what happened and it hasn't put me off the author. Wish me luck with Twilight.