Since, reading Meyer's Twilight Saga, I am a huge fan of her work. I do hope that her novels and work will keep voice her message in the sacred relationship between a man and a woman in a marriage, and the rejection of sex before marriage. The Host is the third novel I've bought during my trips these last 6 months... it's become my habit to find a book I like while waiting my plane at the airport... Periplus is the bookstore I love to drop by in such time...The Host, I've bought during my trip to Bengkulu last month...after Eragon: The Eldest in Semarang, and Acheron in Lampung.
The Host reminded me a lot of Twilight in the fact that it had an unlikely romance and hint of science fiction. It's written in a very similar style to Twilight, probably not the best writing ever, but I like the idea about the aliens taking over our planet. But I must say I like the romance of the characters better than in Twilight Saga...
The main character is The Soul called Wanderer and her host, the human Melanie Stryder. The first couple of chapters are fairly slow and setup the story to come later. The novel is opened by the insertion of the Soul called Wanderer to her human host, a member of resistence group who survived the invasion. It is later revealed that the earth has been taken over by alliens called The Souls. They mainly can not survive without a host. The only place they can survive in their original form is the Origin. Some hosts they were taken before thumans in other plantes were The Dophins, The Seaweeds, the Bears, The Spiders, etc. The souls must be inserted into human bodies so that the human bodies were not damaged. Basically, once the Soul was inserted into a human, it started to take over the mind and the body...so it had all the human memory and then continued to live the human way. It was said that The Souls never killed their hosts...they were just taking over.
"Because he was a soul, by nature he was all things good, compassionate, patient, honest, virtuous, and full of love"
In short, The Souls made the living condition of their formers hosts better, they easily made an adaption...and they were basically good, they could not lie and kill except for The Seekers, which were assigned as somekind of police or law enforcer for the Souls....While the Healers functioned as somekind kind doctors in earth that had responsibility for the insertion and the health of the Souls.
Most human minds just go away when the soul was inserted into their body, but not Melanie. A soul named Wanderer was put into Melanie's body, and the two share Melanie's body. Melanie was considered a member of human resistance. A seeker assigned to Wanderer to track down the rest of the resistence. Wanderer was inserted into Melanie's because the Seeker wanted her to trace Melanie's memory. By that, Wanderer could locate where the rest of the rebels. Melanie shared memories of her former life with the soul, and the two of them together search for the love and family Melanie has lost, Jared, Melanie's Boyfriend, and Jamie, her little brother. She would not give up her body without a fight, especially she would not let Wanderer knew her secret...
Later, the plot developed fairly intriguing to see how Melanie and the Wandered related to each other and to see how the entire story panned out. Wanderer tried to erase Melanie but she got a fight pretty hard while at her tail, the Seeker kept watching her progress. When the Seeker made a threat that it would replace Wanderer from the host, Wanderer saw a common interest with Melanie. Her soft and tender nature rejected inflicting more pain to Melanie, and the memory Melanie gave about Jared had made Melanie her alliance. She knew she shared the strangest feeling she never experienced in her ninth live before...she loved the human Jared.
Things got complicated when She finally met Jared and Jamie and the rest of her family, the Bizarre Jed, the twins Brothers, Kyle and Ian, who were always wanted her dead. They knew Melanie was taken over and they only knew that all Souls were parasites who invaded their planets. Even, Jared was a constant threat to her...in the human hiding cave, she was called Wanda...the story developed fairly intriguing after gradually one by one, they beleived that Wanda was good in nature and that Melanie was still alive inside the body. Ian who previously initiated her death became her loyal guardian angel...he fell in love with Wanda...the problem was Melanie rejected the idea...Melanie's body and mind was only for Jared. Meanwhile, Jared slowly knew that Melanie was still alive...Well...it's really complicated ...
But I like the love between Ian and Wanda...No matter what Wanda looked like, he would love her anyway...
"...It's not the face but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful..."
In the end, Wanda had to decide whether she would stay with her human friends and told them the top secret of her Souls...it was how to separate the Souls from the humans without killing the hosts... or to be loyal to her species...it was turning them to the Seekers...
No comments:
Post a Comment