engelska

“The Host” by Stephanie Mayer

This is Stephanie Mayers first adult book after the “Twilightsaga” and I couldn´t be more pleased with the outcome. Because who doesn’t love a book about love, survival, forgiveness, death and friendship from the most unexpected direktions and that also inlude sience-fiction?

The story is set in America and the world has been taken over by aliens, known as the souls by the surviving humans. The souls can only live on other planets by having a host’s body which they take over the body and mind on, and that is exactly what has happened on earth. A few people are hiding from the souls so that they will not lose their mind and but not their body. When the twenty-year-old Melanie Stryder is looking for her cousin she gets captured by the Seekers - the souls version of the human police who captures humans. A soul called Wanderer gets placed in Melanies body. Wanderer is well informed about how painful it is to take over a person's body. The strong feelings and the all too clear memories. But what she wasn’t ready for is that her host Melanie won’t fade away.

Melanie is an angry presence in Wanderer's head, and she's holding on to her secrets and fills Wanderer's thoughts with visions of the man Melanie loves -Jared, another human who still lives in hiding, and her brother Jaime. After a while, Wanderer is unable to separate herself from her body's desires and she yearns for the man she's never met. Agains both will, they become allies, and, working together, they start to search after the humans they both love.

I absolutely love this book and everything about it. All the chapters are so wonderfull and the entire book is great, but one part stands out just a littel more then the others. That part is when Ian, one of the humans who lives in a cave with other humans including Jarerd and Jaime, tells Wanderer about his love for her. It’s so romantic and I think it’s wonderfull and amazing that Ian loves the soul Wanderer and not the body who Wanderer ‘lives’ in.

The beginning of “The Host” is a bit slow and at first you don’t have a clue of what is going on but after a few chapters it becomes better. The way Stephanie Mayer writes is so touching and real in some strange way, that I just can’t stop reading. I’m not a big fan about sienc-fiction but this has change my mind, it's like my palms is glued onto the book!

“The Host” is an adult novel but I think both young and old people can read it because most of them know about the love in this book. A also think it fits a younger crowd because Melanie is only seventeeen, so maybe teenager can understand Melanie better while the older crowd understand Wanderer better because she is more ‘old-fashion’ in the way she thinks and acts. The language of the book is quite difficult and there are many strange words, but Mayer has written the book so that you can understand even if it is a word you don't recognize, so I would recomend this book to all ages because who can resist a true love story?

Written by: Amanda Abarhamsson 9F