The Host (novel)
"Stephenie Meyer captures characters and handles story like a master - a hybrid combination of Stephen King and Isaac Asimov."
This is one of the 3 quotes on the back of Stephenie Meyer's The Host. And I must admit, this is probably the first book I've read that legitimately frustrated me.
It's also the second book this year up to this point that I stopped reading partway through and have no intention of finishing. The first one was J.R.R. Tolken's The Hobbit, which I stopped reading because I found his writing style hard to read. However, I did get really close to finishing that one, so The Host beats The Hobbit in terms of where I stopped reading (I stopped after chapter 20-something, I put down The Host in the middle of chapter 8). It takes a lot to get me to stop reading a book, and good God do I loathe this piece of crap.
The thing is, the biggest quarrel I had with the movie adaption of this book was the story. Everything else (except for visual design) was done very well, but the movie got such a low score in my book because the overall story and characters were an incredibly bland mess. The book is liquid story. All the actors, props, sound, special effects, cinematography, editing, music, basically everything that the movie had going for it... was no longer there. I was dreading reading this but because I love all of the 5 frequent visitors (thanks guys) I decided to pioneer dangerous waters.
The first thing that I want to make clear is that Stephanie Meyer isn't a bad writer, she's just Russel Crowe.
In Les Miserables everybody was joking about Russel Crowe's singing. Overall, he wasn't a bad singer. He was pitch matching correctly, he was in tune, he was following the correct beat, and he wasn't sing talking. But, Russel Crowe is trained in a different kind of singing than Broadway singing, and it was very easy to separate him from Hugh Jackman and Ann Hathaway because he wasn't putting enough emotion into it.
Stephenie Meyer does the exact same thing. She has a decent story, she uses grammar correctly, she follows her own continuity correctly, and she uses big words in the right way. However, she's easily separated from J. K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Rick Riodrian, and other modern writers in similar genres because she isn't an organic writer.
In stage acting, you have two tool kits that you can draw from. The Clearity and the Organic.
The Clarity is the stuff that you do to make sure the audience knows what's going on. This includes:
The Organic is the stuff that you do to make your performance believable. This one isn't as clean cut as instead of a list of universal rules, you have two sets of questions you can ask about your character at any given point in time, and then perform accordingly.
1. What is my intention? What's keeping me from my intention? What am I going to do about it?
2. Given my characters traits, if I were this character what would I do in this situation?
These principals also apply to writing. The issue with Meyer is that in an attempt to make the story easy to read she sacrifices the Organic side. She justifies this by having an intelligent logical 1st person narrator tell the story. But this still doesn't make sense within its own context.
Most of the characters in this story aren't particularly literate south-westerners. When we break into Melanie's mind and read from her perspective, we still have big vocabulary, stupendously proper punctuation, and no exclamation points. It's 1st person for God's sake! Use a fluffy exclamation point!
In fact, if Wanderer only has the mental capacities of Melanie but has it's own consciousness, it should have a vaguely limited vocabulary too. But it doesn't... I don't get it.
Scenes take way to long to play out and often I'm sitting there thinking to myself "good God, just say you want to have sex with him." I know that Meyer is trying to be politically correct (this is for teenagers after all) but once you introduce the idea of a 18 year old girl doin' it with a 26 year old, any political correctness you could have possibly mustered has been flushed down the toilet. So, just say so. Makes the chapter about 3 pages shorter
But probably her most notorious offense is not defining character clear enough. Like I said, I didn't finish the novel, and I only know the story because I saw the movie, but all Meyer does is say "character X is like this." and that's all she thinks you need to know. The two best written characters were Wanderer and the Seeker who's name escapes me. The reason for this is that we actually get to see what they're like. Wanderer is the kindhearted antisocial agoraphobic and the seeker is the gigantic control freak. With everyone else, they had character traits that were exposited, but never really observed.
I really want to like this book, I do, but even the first 8 chapters had too many plot holes, pacing speed constantly in flux, and overall it just wasn't enjoyable. The thing is, the story doesn't make sense. I can't follow the alien's logic properly. Doesn't anybody have ethical concerns about technically performing mass genocide? No? Because it seems like you should. In fact the way the aliens operate makes no sense. If you need to cut into somebody's neck in order to implant one of these things, how do you cut into the very first neck? But I digress.
I didn't see if my nitpicks from the movie were explained further in the book because I only got to chapter 8. But what small percentage of the story I read, my first impression of a Stephenie Meyer romance, I did not enjoy. Meyer's biggest sin is probably that she has a good idea which would probably be enjoyable on its own, and she almost completely butchers it because of the unemotional writing style.
Most Teen Fantasy Romance is an already successful idea with a romance stuck into it somewhere. Twilight=Dracula. Time Between Us=Back to the Future. The Hunger Games=1984. etc. The Host was Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it so blatantly rips it off but does something interesting with it... and then it dies!
OK, you can use big words, you can do all that, we get it, but just because you can do that doesn't mean you should. I could write all of these reviews in the Jane Schaffer format but I don't because it doesn't make sense for me to do so. Meyer needs to learn this lesson if she wants me to read another one of her books.
2/10
This is one of the 3 quotes on the back of Stephenie Meyer's The Host. And I must admit, this is probably the first book I've read that legitimately frustrated me.
It's also the second book this year up to this point that I stopped reading partway through and have no intention of finishing. The first one was J.R.R. Tolken's The Hobbit, which I stopped reading because I found his writing style hard to read. However, I did get really close to finishing that one, so The Host beats The Hobbit in terms of where I stopped reading (I stopped after chapter 20-something, I put down The Host in the middle of chapter 8). It takes a lot to get me to stop reading a book, and good God do I loathe this piece of crap.
The thing is, the biggest quarrel I had with the movie adaption of this book was the story. Everything else (except for visual design) was done very well, but the movie got such a low score in my book because the overall story and characters were an incredibly bland mess. The book is liquid story. All the actors, props, sound, special effects, cinematography, editing, music, basically everything that the movie had going for it... was no longer there. I was dreading reading this but because I love all of the 5 frequent visitors (thanks guys) I decided to pioneer dangerous waters.
The first thing that I want to make clear is that Stephanie Meyer isn't a bad writer, she's just Russel Crowe.
In Les Miserables everybody was joking about Russel Crowe's singing. Overall, he wasn't a bad singer. He was pitch matching correctly, he was in tune, he was following the correct beat, and he wasn't sing talking. But, Russel Crowe is trained in a different kind of singing than Broadway singing, and it was very easy to separate him from Hugh Jackman and Ann Hathaway because he wasn't putting enough emotion into it.
Stephenie Meyer does the exact same thing. She has a decent story, she uses grammar correctly, she follows her own continuity correctly, and she uses big words in the right way. However, she's easily separated from J. K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Rick Riodrian, and other modern writers in similar genres because she isn't an organic writer.
In stage acting, you have two tool kits that you can draw from. The Clearity and the Organic.
The Clarity is the stuff that you do to make sure the audience knows what's going on. This includes:
- Cheating out
- Projecting your voice
- Action, diolougue, action
- etc.
The Organic is the stuff that you do to make your performance believable. This one isn't as clean cut as instead of a list of universal rules, you have two sets of questions you can ask about your character at any given point in time, and then perform accordingly.
1. What is my intention? What's keeping me from my intention? What am I going to do about it?
2. Given my characters traits, if I were this character what would I do in this situation?
These principals also apply to writing. The issue with Meyer is that in an attempt to make the story easy to read she sacrifices the Organic side. She justifies this by having an intelligent logical 1st person narrator tell the story. But this still doesn't make sense within its own context.
Most of the characters in this story aren't particularly literate south-westerners. When we break into Melanie's mind and read from her perspective, we still have big vocabulary, stupendously proper punctuation, and no exclamation points. It's 1st person for God's sake! Use a fluffy exclamation point!
In fact, if Wanderer only has the mental capacities of Melanie but has it's own consciousness, it should have a vaguely limited vocabulary too. But it doesn't... I don't get it.
Scenes take way to long to play out and often I'm sitting there thinking to myself "good God, just say you want to have sex with him." I know that Meyer is trying to be politically correct (this is for teenagers after all) but once you introduce the idea of a 18 year old girl doin' it with a 26 year old, any political correctness you could have possibly mustered has been flushed down the toilet. So, just say so. Makes the chapter about 3 pages shorter
But probably her most notorious offense is not defining character clear enough. Like I said, I didn't finish the novel, and I only know the story because I saw the movie, but all Meyer does is say "character X is like this." and that's all she thinks you need to know. The two best written characters were Wanderer and the Seeker who's name escapes me. The reason for this is that we actually get to see what they're like. Wanderer is the kindhearted antisocial agoraphobic and the seeker is the gigantic control freak. With everyone else, they had character traits that were exposited, but never really observed.
I really want to like this book, I do, but even the first 8 chapters had too many plot holes, pacing speed constantly in flux, and overall it just wasn't enjoyable. The thing is, the story doesn't make sense. I can't follow the alien's logic properly. Doesn't anybody have ethical concerns about technically performing mass genocide? No? Because it seems like you should. In fact the way the aliens operate makes no sense. If you need to cut into somebody's neck in order to implant one of these things, how do you cut into the very first neck? But I digress.
I didn't see if my nitpicks from the movie were explained further in the book because I only got to chapter 8. But what small percentage of the story I read, my first impression of a Stephenie Meyer romance, I did not enjoy. Meyer's biggest sin is probably that she has a good idea which would probably be enjoyable on its own, and she almost completely butchers it because of the unemotional writing style.
Most Teen Fantasy Romance is an already successful idea with a romance stuck into it somewhere. Twilight=Dracula. Time Between Us=Back to the Future. The Hunger Games=1984. etc. The Host was Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it so blatantly rips it off but does something interesting with it... and then it dies!
OK, you can use big words, you can do all that, we get it, but just because you can do that doesn't mean you should. I could write all of these reviews in the Jane Schaffer format but I don't because it doesn't make sense for me to do so. Meyer needs to learn this lesson if she wants me to read another one of her books.
2/10