The Host

Stephenie Meyer is best known for her young-adult Twilight series, about a mortal girl in love with a teenage-appearing vampire. The Host is her first novel for "adults", but the Twilight series isn't all that juvenile, and The Host isn't all that adult. The tone is very similar and one should not be surprised that the author is a Mormon housewife. There is much more here of romance and idealistic relationships than there is of the more cynical sex and violence that we are used to in adult novels.

With that, The Host has a very creative and unique premise - alien invaders of Earth who are basically souls without bodies, whose practice is to take over planets by having themselves installed into the neural systems of the dominant species. The main character is Wanderer, who has lived seven previous lives in different alien species, but this is her first time as a human. She is injected into the body of Melanie. But humans aren't as simple to subdue as other species, and Wanderer finds that Melanie continues to fight her possessor. And Wanderer soon understands that Melanie is influencing her thoughts, her beliefs, and her needs.

There are human rebels that have not yet been possessed, and eventually Wanderer is drawn to join them. She is to learn that Melanie yearns for her younger brother and her rebel lover, who escaped together even though Melanie herself was captured. Wanderer finds that the life of humans, as violent and indifferent to others as it is, still has experiences and emotions that the invaders never had nor anticipated.

Recommended highly. The unique premise more than makes up for some of the romanticism of human behavior.

Expecting Adam

This lovely true story by Martha Beck is both spiritual and very, very human.

What happens when two Harvard graduate students, type-A, achievement-oriented control freaks find out that the child they are expecting has Down's syndrome? How do they cope? How does it change them?

The answers are amazing - not the least because their struggle is titanic. Martha is ill throughout her pregnancy. John is busily trying to handle research in Singapore with writing a doctoral dissertation in Cambridge. And both of them are dealing with family issues, the expectation of perfection, and doubt that bringing the child to term is in fact the right thing to do.

But something magical happens as they are expecting Adam.

Read this one with an open mind - for even if they are delusional people, the things they learned are valuable lessons for us all.
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Other books read since last entry - Wild Swans by Jung Chang.