I’m over halfway through The Host and I’m more in love with this book than I have been with a book in a very long time. On the surface it’s a lot like an adult version of the Twilight Series. It is in the most plain way about the interaction between species and good and evil and many other confusing things. But it is more different from those books than Huck Finn is different from it.
What I’m struck the most by in this book is that there is a complete lack of black and white in this book. It’s about two species, one ostensibly good and one ostensibly bad and yet both is good and bad. It’s about good vs. bad vs. good vs. bad. It’s the unbelievable gray area in which we are all lost all the time.
I think that’s why it’s one of the best character studies I’ve read in a long time. It takes you to the edge of certainty, the knowledge that one way is correct and then slams you back in the opposite direction without a second thought. Characters that are filled with hate are given second chances by those they plague and the good are made to suffer for those that they are most like. It’s a moral battle on an epic scale. I can’t wait to finish it, to see how it resolves. It is a glorious tale.
