okaylauragrace 's review for:

The Host by Stephenie Meyer
2.0
Spoiler Since the weather is getting whoa-hoa-hoa-hoa-hoa again I'm going down a bit of a Smeyer hole for my own sick enjoyment. That being said: Smeyer PLEASE stop writing child-coded characters in relationships with full grown men. I'm begging. It's so weird. It happens like 6 times in this book. I get that it's the end of the world, and age gaps aren't as serious when there's only 37 of you in a hole, but fuck dude. If the world ended today I wouldn't shack up with a 16 year old, and I don't think most people would either. I cannot imagine the decline in civilization resulting in a worldwide decline of general morality.

The Host was tiresome to get through, because there are sooooo many pages of repetitiveness. The main characters are borderline annoying most times. The setting gets stale. The main conflict gets incredibly stale about halfway through. Like, yeah, we get it. She's an alien. Everyone hates her. This didn't need to be (in my version, anyway) 600 pages worth of text. I ended up putting it down for like a month because I just. Couldn't.

However, the conclusion was cool. The last 300 or so pages were genuinely the most interesting part of the entire book, and I finished a bulk of the time I actually spent on this book during those pages because it was actually cool. This is such a cool concept, I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if it was literally anyone other than Smeyer. I read that this is a book that might become a trilogy. I might look into reading that, even if reading this was just okay.

I don't think anything in this is technically a spoiler, but I'm going to hide it all anyway as I'm not the best at telling what is or isn't ground-breaking plot points for some people. This book was so predictable at times that I was guessing events 200 pages in advance, but I'm also just kinda like that. I don't know if it's representative of Smeyer at all. She is a good writer. This book was fine. I'm hypercritical. We knew that.