So I guess given I’m graduating in less than two weeks, I may as well give a life update. Are you at the edge of your seat? Please don’t be. Anyway, here goes! As long as my loans go through, I’m headed to London next year for graduate school, boyfriend and I have worked things out, and I’m headed to England to see him right after graduation, and (most importantly) I can’t stop watching Bob’s Burgers and Vampire Diaries.
I also have been having way too much fun making stupid rhymes in my head about this book title. This book is the hostess with the mostess. YOUR HOST IS TOAST! I can’t wait to boast about my post on The Host. I sure hope The Host has a ghost.
God, I hope this chapter isn’t as hard to explain as the prologue. Oh, in case you don’t remember or didn’t read my last post, basically the “souls” (alien creatures) are silver, have feathers, and live inside of other species and take on their memories and such. It’s unclear whether we are supposed to like these creatures. They also appear to have really stupid names (I’m looking at you Fords Deep Waters).
Chapter 1
We’re now in the mind of the soul, and she is about to remember her host’s last minutes. First she has to adjust to English, though.
The language I found myself using was odd, but it made sense. Choppy, boxy, blind, and linear.
It’s clear where James got her writing style from. You know, how she just throws random adjectives together and hopes we’re so awed by her choices that we won’t actually put thought into them and realize they’re nonsensical.
We learn that the soul has never experienced smell before. Now, I’d like to point out that in the prologue other souls made a huge stinking deal about how this soul had been in tons of bodies! Including fucking dragons! I’m fairly certain she has been able to smell before. That aside, I hope we get her first reaction to smelling a fart. That would be a great bit of detail to include in this series! I bet Meyer would handle it masterfully.
It also appears that the memory is being narrated by the former host of the body. Which makes no sense because no one thinks this way, especially not in a moment of complete terror when, you know, you’re about to die!
It’s so dark. I can’t see. I can’t see the floor. I can’t see my hands stretched out in front of me. I run blind and try to hear the pursuit I can feel behind me…
Nobody narrates their lives/memories like a book! This is ridiculous. And no, that isn’t the soul thinking that in the first person, which would make more sense, this shifts into another font to indicate the shift in narrative.
The host was being chased by “the Seekers” and they told her everything was fine, but she wasn’t buying it, so she kept running. During this memory, the soul realizes her host is actually speaking to her. What the even fuck? Isn’t she dead?
So the Seekers try to warn the host, but she keeps running and jumps to her death. Down an abandoned elevator shaft.
The soul thinks that the memory is done, but oh no. She has a “memory within a memory” MEMORYCEPTION! And omg, you guessed it, it’s the face of a totally cute BOY!
I’d seen this kind of face in the images I had been given to prepare for this world. It was hard to tell them apart, to see the tiny variations in color and shape that were the only markers of the individual.
I can’t believe we’re reading about such a racist alien. Rude.
However, this face is different.
I knew nothing of what passed for beauty among these strangers, and yet I knew that this face was beautiful.
He’s so hot, even aliens who can’t tell humans apart think he’s hot. This is so strange, I didn’t think Meyer usually wrote about absurdly attractive men.
The host starts getting territorial and thinking “Mine,” aggressively at the alien. So we’re going to have cat fights within the same brain?! Oh, man. I would so read a crossover between these two and Ana/Ana’s inner goddess/Ana’s subconscious.
Chapter 2
The soul begins to wake up and hears Seekers speaking around her. She has to remind herself that she’s not actually supposed to be afraid of them. She also learns what sarcasm is, so that makes me like her a little more.
We learn a bit about our host buddy:
“One human girl, alone and unarmed! Yes, quite a threat to our peace.”
The woman breathed out heavily. A sigh. “But where did she come from? How did she appear in the middle of Chicago, a city long since civilized, hundreds of miles from any trace of rebel activity? Did she manage it alone?”
SHE DID WHATEVER IT WAS FOR LOVE!!!! Or so I assume.
They give the soul the name Wanderer…because she has wandered far…
There are a lot vague references to when the aliens first occupied the planet and whether not there is currently peace. The Seeker speaker and the other speaker who is a Healer (and who may be Fords Deep Waters, I’m confused) are getting pretty testy with each other. The Healer doesn’t want Wanderer to have to do whatever it is she needs to do, but the Seeker does. There ya go.
The Seeker and the Healer talk about how the remaining humans are outnumbered, and Wanderer thinks a bunch of random shit that maybe Matt will discuss more in his post tomorrow. The only thing I’m going to mention is that she says that souls don’t lie, but they do tell stories, which sometimes they forget are stories, so technically it’s not lying. Hookay.
This seems particularly significant as well:
there were whispers of this: of human hosts so strong that the souls were forced to abandon them. Hosts whose minds could not be completely suppressed. Souls who took on the personality of the body, rather than the other way around. Stories. Wild rumors. Madness.
Except we know it’s not madness and is clearly what is happening to Wanderer. Even though I thought her host was toast? It’s also made more clear that Seekers seek out remaining humans and force them to become hosts. Wanderer tries to explore more memories:
I tried another avenue of searching, hoping for clearer responses. What was her goal? She would find… Sharon— I fished out the name— and they would… I hit a wall. It was a blank, a nothing. I tried to circle around it, but I couldn’t find the edges of the void. It was as if the information I sought had been erased. As if this brain had been damaged.
Wanderer feels rage for the first time. Get used to it, honey, we humans feel it a lot! Wait till you experience PMS, Wanderer, and then you’ll really know what I’m talking about!
The Seeker realizes she’s awake. TBC!
…What the even fuck???
I have absolutely no clue what just occurred.
Me neither, my friend, me neither =(
Souls can’t lie. That means that they were adapted neither mentally nor physically for invading the Earth.
HOW DID THIS INVASION HAPPEN!?
Our lying human nature is corrupting the pour souls!
our greatest self-defense
I don’t think I fully agree with you on the “shift in font”=”shift in narrative” conclusion – I think Meyer just tried to indicate the difference between Wanderer telling us what she saw in memories and what Wanderer is experiencing in the now. Later on in the book, when there’s a shift in narrator, Meyer uses italics rather than a different font.
Also, the host can’t be toast (I like what you did there :)), as souls can only live in hosts that are still alive. That’s why this host tried to kill herself: so her body would be useless to the souls. “Unfortunately” she survived and her body was fixed really quickly with the souls’ miracle SciFi meds.
I do have to say I was quite confused at the start of this book too, but it will all sort of start to make sense after a while! But there will also still be plenty to make fun of too. 🙂
Yes there were italics as well! Good call Molly 🙂 it was hard to explain how my
Kindle made things look different and how odd the shift was as no one thinks that way!
That makes a lot more sense! I thought they killed her but healed her body and essentially brought the organs and things back to life and became a new…soul. Man I still think all of this is cray.
Please, Please, PLEASE tell me that the hot boy has pale white skin and glowing amber eyes and his name is Fedward Dullen!! Seriously though, is this Meyer ripping off EL James now with the whole “Mine” thing?
(and congrats on Grad School in London near Boyfriend)
So Meyer would be ripping off E.L. James who was ripping off Meyer.
Awesome.
Exactly. It all comes full circle…
I love that they’re stuck in a very vicious and poorly written circle. Gives me stuff to write about!
So next we are going to have a kinky the Host rip-off? Ugh, I look foward to that.
It’s already going to be a threesome of sorts, what with two sharing a body 😉
Is that like dividing by zero? We’re about to witness a tear in the space time continuum aren’t we?
I’m not sure if I gave up after chapter two or chapter three. It gets confusing trying to distinguish between ‘wanderer’, wanderer experiencing her host’s memories, the host, the host remembering her own memories, and wanderer experiencing the host remembering her own memories…
I’m looking forward to the whole love triangle between two people. Should be interesting!
Squick. I’m telling you, I’m just glad I’m a ginger… You know, ’cause there’s no need for me to worry about ‘souls’. Baddum-tsk.
Seriously though, that description Meyer gave of the soul just gave me a few chills. Not because it was a disturbing procedure to imagine, or because it brought back all those memories of those horrible earwig legends that had me in a year-long state of paranoia after reading them, it was because of all that damn, flowery language that was used to describe it. It was like hearing a totally sanguine, hippy-type person recite a detail-heavy report on the effects of krokodill. That dissonance between the tone and the actual goings-on was just… blurk.
Well, in retrospect, this is probably Meyer trying to get across just how freaky, off-kilt, and utterly alien these ‘souls’ are. In that case, she succeeded stupendously.
Seriously though, I believe that this whole concept would work better as a horror instead of a complicated romance/adventure (or so I think this is going. I could be wrong, I could. I sincerely doubt it, but I could). I really just want to read through the whole thing so that I can see exactly where and how Meyer takes this.