Lately it’s been hard for me to find books that I love. I’ve read plenty that are pretty good, that I might recommend if someone asked me for a reading suggestion, but there hasn’t been anything recently that has made me want to go around telling people, “You HAVE to read this.” This past weekend, I think I found the book that has broken that dry spell: The Host by Stephanie Meyer.
Meyer found fame five years ago, with the first installment of her vampire saga, Twilight. I remember hearing about her books, which were becoming immensely popular, several years ago, but I never picked one up, since they were targeted to a teen audience. Then last summer she published Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, and it knocked Harry Potter out of the number one best-seller spot.
This week, Entertainment Weekly’s cover featured the actors who will star in the movie adaptation of the Twilight series, and I decided to read the article. There were a few sentences about The Host, saying it was her first adult novel and is a blend of science fiction and romance. Oh, yeah, it also sold for $600,000 at auction and debuted at No. 1. Which means that Meyer is a rockstar in the literary world.
I haven’t read science fiction in a very long time, not since I fell in love with The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time when I was young, and I am happy that Meyer renewed my interest. The Host is interesting, thoughtful, and wildly imaginative. Unlike a lot of what I read, where my facination with the characters generates my interest in the novel’s plot, the plot of this novel is making me interested in the characters. Which is so refreshing. Reading something where the plot is so crazily inventive is a great change of pace from character study (though that is defintely not to say that Meyer doesn’t have an equally insightful take on what, literally, makes up the human soul. In this book, alien “souls” take possession of human, plant, and animal “host” bodies. The “soul” that is the focus of the book can’t subdue the mind of the human body it has possessed).
I’m only about 100 pages in, and I’m happy there are 500 more to go. If Meyer can create a dynamic, crisp, intricate world in the first sliver of her book, I can’t wait to see where she goes from here.
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