Review: The Host

Title: The Host
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Category: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
Summary: An alien race has infiltrated Earth by using humans as host bodies. One of the last surviving humans is captured, and a "soul" is inserted into her body. But she's not ready to let go of her body, and she's certainly not going to make it easy on the intruder who's taken it over.

Review: This woman tells a great story, that's for sure. This book hooked a finger in my shirt and yanked me in with no mercy—just like the Twilight series. The difference is when I read the Twilight series, Abby was taking 30-45 minutes to eat every two hours, so I had plenty of time to read. Now she's 5 months old and taking only 10 minutes to eat every 3 hours, so that means much less time to read.

But—and I realize I'm self-nominating for the Bad Mother of the Year award here—I couldn't put this book down when Abby finished eating so I would dangle a rattle in one hand and use the other hand to read just.one.more.paragraph. Of course, that always led to another paragraph, and another, and another.

This story has the perfect love triangle—the host body is in love with one man and the alien living in the host body is in love with another.

With all that said though, some things in this book did disappoint me. Sometimes, I felt like there was too much descriptive text—I found myself skipping over descriptions of how the main character was feeling so I could get to the action. I guess I wanted more showing, less telling in some places.

But my bigger problem with the book is that, just as with the Twilight series, the main character's weakness really annoyed the crap out of me at times. I got a little tired of her getting hurt and being carried around by one of her two love interests. And I don't want to spoil anything, but the ending isn't exactly a stellar example of strength.

On a petty and shallow level, I was hoping to get what we haven't gotten in the Twilight series (yet at least—I haven't read Breaking Dawn), if you know what I mean. This is an adult book, for pete's sake.

But even with all that said, the story was intriguing and I'm glad I read it. It was a great ride.