Vacation Reads!

I went on vacation! It was awesome! So, of course, I needed a couple light and fluffy books downloaded onto my Kindle to get me through the plane rides and the long arduous hours spent on the beach. I actually downloaded several such books onto my Kindle but it was a pretty action-packed vacation and I'm a slow reader so I only got through two books.

Beautiful Creatures
by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

I am so excited for this movie! You may have noticed a pattern with me by now. When a movie is coming out that I am interested in, I don't have to read the book first, but I do like to, especially if it sounds like a book I would have enjoyed anyway.

I did enjoy this book. It was kind of Twilight-esque without all the passive whining. Two teenagers fall in love and strive to stay together despite certain paranormal forces getting in their way. But there's also an element of mystery and, set in a small town in the South, there is a pervading feeling of The Old South that the main character spends the entire book fighting. I really enjoyed that part of it, being fascinated with the Civil War myself and humanity's general tendency to reject what is new and unknown.

In the end, it wasn't a great read, but it was fun and served its purpose for my vacation.

The Host
by Stephenie Meyer

I was really disappointed by this book. First off, let me just say that I genuinely enjoyed the Twilight books. They were light, fun reads that were also gripping and totally suspenseful. Few books have kept me up half the night reading but these did. They were the kind of books that I devoured, enjoyed, and then forgot about. Except then there was all the Twilight mania and I wasn't allowed to forget about them.

So I was expecting the same from this book. At first I was all in, the concept is fascinating and it pulled me in. But then there was a lot of wandering around in the desert and I got bored. Even when the main character met up with people it took a long time for me to regain interest in the book and I finally figured out why. The main character (i.e. the alien who took over the girl's body) makes Bella look pro-active. Yeah. Hence my total lack of interest until, like Bella, extreme circumstances force her to finally DO something! Then the book picked up its pace and I regained interest enough to finish the book.

The Twilight books had a problem I hadn't noticed until a friend pointed them out to me. She said she was never afraid that Bella was not going to get everything she wanted. And she's right. And the same applies here. At the end, the main character gets ready to make this huge sacrifice and I was ready for it but then, in typical Meyer fashion, her friends took over and came up with a magical solution (which I didn't quite buy the logic of) and all her wishes came true. Honestly, it would have been a much better book if she had just died at the end and left it at that.