The Host

title: The Host
author: Stephenie Meyer
how I read it: once from the school library, once before I gave it to my Dad for Christmas, once as an audiobook

Melanie Stryder has done the unthinkable: she has stayed present and conscious in her own body, despite the Soul who controls it. The Host tells a classic “tale of the bodysnatchers” story, with a twist; this time, the story is told through the eyes of Wanderer, the parasitic alien creature who’s doing the snatching. Melanie floods Wanderer with memories of Jared until he is all that either of them can think about. Soul and Host become reluctant allies in their goal to save the man that they both love.

The first few pages of The Host are slow and a bit difficult to understand. I had to push my way through the first chapter in particular and I nearly put the book down. I'm glad that I persevered, because once this book takes off, it's impossible to put down. The story is well-paced and suspenseful. I found myself rereading exciting passages multiple times because I loved the fact that Meyer managed to surprise me.

The love triangle - three people in two bodies - was interesting and fun. While this idea has been explored before (that two-timing Rio in love with both Jem and Jerica, anyone?), Meyer made it seem like a fresh and completely original idea.

This book has some flaws. There are very few shades of gray in the characters. For the most part, they are either "good" or "bad". While a few of the characters do change and grow, they tend to do it in a very sudden and jerky fashion. They flip from "good" to "bad", or from "bad" to "good" quickly and without much personal anguish. Wanderer (renamed Wanda by the humans) was particularly cloying at times. While I really did like her, her goodness bordered on boring. She also never seemed to grapple with the moral issues of being a parasite, despite coming to love the humans.

With Stephenie Meyer's meteoric rise to fame, it's hard not to compare The Host to the Twilight series. In my opinion, The Host is a far more interesting and original book. I know that this is probably going to shock (and possibly annoy) a lot of people, but I didn't really like Twilight. I found the female lead one-dimensional, weak, needy and almost kittenish. Wanda suffers the same fate in many ways; she is submissive and almost too "good". But because of the way that Souls are portrayed - as gentle and nonviolent by nature - it was much more acceptable to me to have a weak female lead. Still, I hope that if Meyers writes any more books, she'll drop the whole "damsel in distress" plot and write a stronger, more independent female character.

This book made me want to: build a bunker and stock it with supplies. Oh, who am I kidding. I've wanted to do that for years.

Verdict: Despite its flaws, this was a good story with strong pacing and likeable characters - well worth reading!

Sequels: none as of yet.

Exodus

title: Exodus
author: Julie Bertagna
how I read it: I borrowed this one three times from the public library

In the year 2099, the polar icecaps have melted and most of the world is underwater. 15-year-old Mara and her small village cling to a life of subsistence farming on Wing, an island in the North Atlantic that gets smaller every year. Finally, caught in a terrifying storm that seems to be eating up their island altogether, they set off into the ocean on small boats, with no guarantee that they will ever find anywhere to land.

The characters in this book are strong, realistic and likeable, but Bertagna doesn't pull any punches. Bad things sometimes happen to good people in this book, the way that they do in wars and environmental disasters. Bertagna researched refugee camps when writing this book, and this really comes through during some of the scenes. I could feel the hopelessness, hunger, fear, frustration and sheer boredom during the part of the book that drew on this research.

This is a truly remarkable book of courage, loss and perseverence. The fact that I read it three times (and would happily read it again) is testament to the quality of both story-telling and writing. Honestly, I don't feel that this book has gotten anywhere near the attention that it deserves. I've never met anyone who's read it, unless it's been on my recommendation. I don't understand what makes one book a bestseller while another equally good book - like Exodus - remains relatively unknown. If any young adult fiction belongs on a best-seller list, then this one should be right up there with the best of them.

This book made me want to: become a better swimmer.

Verdict: Truly beautiful book that I think should be on everyone's "must-read" list.

Sequels: Zenith (available) and Aurora (not yet finished). Exodus can be read as a standalone novel - no cliffhangers, although the ending is both open and bittersweet.

The Knife of Never Letting Go

title: The Knife of Never Letting Go
author: Patrick Ness
how I read it: epub from the public library

Young Todd Hewitt lives in Prentisstown, a small settlement on New World. He was born there, and he knows nothing other than the world he lives in: a world where a Noise germ has infected people so that animals can speak and men hear each others' every thought. Todd is a lonely boy on the brink of manhood in a mysterious and aggressive village.

(Please don't be dissuaded by the talking animals. These animals "talk" the way that real animals might, words and pictures about whatever it is that they happen to be doing. Imagine a predator breathing "flesh" and "teeth" and "eat" while it watches you from beneath the water. These are not the whimsical talking animals found far too often in children's picture books.)

I will tell you no more than this. I started reading this book knowing nothing about it, and I'm convinced that it's best to go into this book with very little prior knowledge. As Todd learned more about his world, I learned alongside him; I believe that this made the book even more intriguing and fascinating. While many of the mysteries were really not all that surprising to me once they were revealed, I was still engaged and invested in Todd's sense of shock at all that he learned.

The author made some stylistic choices that I didn't love at first. I'm not a huge fan of books written in dialect, and although I was able to stop noticing the "yer"s and "tho"s after the first chapter, words like "attenshun" grated on me each time I read them. Maybe it's my own accent - but I really don't see that "attenshun" sounds all that different from "attention".

Still, other stylistic choices worked extremely well. This story is told in the first person, and Todd's voice is very strong. He is uneducated, innocent, stubborn, far less sure than he claims to be and utterly, utterly believable. The run-on sentences read like well-constructed streams of consciousness when Todd is confused or frightened. The cut-off sentences during action sequences added to the tension and suspense; I found myself breathless, my eyes skipping over each cut-off line to find out what would happen.

Overall, this is a fantastic book. It is very well-paced and the author is a gifted wordsmith. The story is original and thought-provoking. The themes that this book grapples with are huge: gender politics, individualism, privacy, religious fundamentalism, the atrocities of war. At its heart, this book is a strong and true coming of age story, with likable characters and an exciting plot that keeps you guessing.

Unfortunately, the last few pages of this book soured my reading experience a bit. Like many other young adult science fiction books, this book is the first installment in a trilogy (Chaos Walking Trilogy). While I am thrilled to know that there are two more books waiting for me, that doesn't lessen my disappointment in the utter lack of closure at the end of this book. The book doesn't end. It stops suddenly on a cliffhanger, one of my pet peeves in young adult speculative fiction. As I've mentioned before, I like to decide for myself to read a sequel, not feel manipulated by a story that doesn't even hint at an end. And to be honest, this ending felt a bit like a new TV series that ends on a cliffhanger in hopes that the series will be picked up for another year.

That said, I will absolutely read the next book. I became very emotionally invested in this book. My heart pounded at the scary parts, I laughed out loud a few times, and I actually cried - a true rarity for me. I have to find out what's going to happen to Todd and his friend!

This book made me want to: hug my dog. And my Mom.

Verdict: Original and compelling story. Had it ended, I would have said that I highly recommend this book to any and all. As it stands, I recommend it, but only after making clear my disappointment with the lack of closure.

Sequels: The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
author: Carrie Ryan
how I read it: ePub from the public library

Mary’s village sits alone and isolated, the last pocket of civilization in a sea of trees and horror. Mary’s life is one of constraints; she is bound both by the chain-link fence that encloses her small village and by the strict social rules that govern every aspect of her existence. Her life’s soundtrack consists of the moaning and rattling that surround her village and the Sisters’ lectures about what is expected of her.

I chose this book because the title intrigued me. I didn’t know what to expect when I began reading. The first thing that struck me was the author’s use of capitalization to show me What Was Important: the Forest, the Return, the Guardians, the Unconsecrated, the Sisters. To be honest, this stylistic choice struck me as a little bit clumsy and I almost put the book down. Then I realized that the Unconsecrated were zombies.

Yes, zombies.

So obviously I kept reading.

The concept behind this book is absolutely fascinating. This isn’t a story about surviving the chaos and terror of a zombie apocalypse. It isn’t about characters coming to terms with people dying and coming back to eat them. It isn’t about bands of humans turning on one another in a sea of shuffling, hungry, mindless, tireless creatures. (Oh, how I love zombie stories...)

Instead, this is a story about what happens after the world has ended. Over a century after the Return, people are used to the moaning undead scrabbling at the chain link fence, breaking their fingers and teeth trying to get through. That the dead return to eat the living has become a normal, everyday part of life. Mary, the main character, feels suffocated by the constraints put in place by religious leaders to protect, increase and ultimately control the small population of survivors who believe that they are the only humans left.

While the concept continues to intrigue me, I must admit that I didn’t feel much for the characters. Mary seemed somehow flat and unrelatable. She was not the contradictory, passionate, flawed, strong heroine that I tend to prefer in young adult novels. Instead, she was a bit dull and single-minded. She wanted what she wanted – whether what she wanted was a boy or the ocean – and she was willing to sacrifice anything to get it. I found her behaviour to be selfish and her passion not believable enough to excuse her selfishness:

“I promised him that I wouldn’t accept safe and calm. Not at the expense of my dreams.”

Nope, sorry. I’m just not buying it.

One of the main things that I look for in young adult fiction is character growth. At its heart, young adult literature is about growing up, changing, learning more about oneself and the world. Unfortunately, the Mary that we met on the first page of this novel was the same Mary that we found on the last one. The other characters in the book – Harry, Travis, Cass – were no more three-dimensional than Mary. The obligatory love triangle fell flat for me; I honestly didn’t care about the romantic conflicts at all. To be honest, the richest character was Argos, the puppy. I worried a lot about him during the zombie attacks.

I don’t mean to judge this book too harshly. Carrie Ryan’s debut novel was – as I’ve already said – based on an exciting and original idea. It was suspenseful and dark, as zombie stories should be. There were some unresolved mysteries in the story that left me wondering – that might be a negative for some, but it’s a positive for me. I prefer that books not end in a tidy package tied up with a bow.

The world was interesting enough to keep me reading and Ryan stayed true to the grim post-apocalyptic atmosphere that she set in the beginning. Had the author put more of an emphasis on character development and less on zombie attacks, I think that this could have been a very good book. I will definitely read more of her books, although I hope that her future work has stronger, more developed characters.

this books made me want to: learn how to shoot a bow and arrow

verdict: The Forest of Hands and Teeth is worth reading if you like zombies as much as I do, but don’t expect it to be life-changing. It won’t linger in your mind long after you’ve read it.

sequels: The Dead-Tossed Waves, The Dark and Hollow Places