This months book review

THE HOST
By Stephanie Meyer
Published by Sphere. £7.99     

Melanie is part of a human group resisting the alien invasion of Earth. She gets caught and a soul named Wanderer is inserted into her body. Melanie’s consciousness won’t fade away, however, and her thoughts and memories move Wanderer to love the people Melanie once loved. This leads Wanderer to set out to find her host body’s family, and what follows is the story of her time with the humans of the resistance movement.
The Host is marketed as “science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction.” This is true. The science fiction aspect is that it involves aliens who possess technology well advanced beyond ours, but it’s firstly a love story on several levels. There’s friendship and familial love as well as romantic love in likely and unlikely places. Ultimately, it’s about the power and hope of love. It is an amazing book, definitely one to put on your books to re-read pile!

JUST AFTER SUNSET 
By Stephen King      
published by Hodder. £7.99

The dead are all around in Stephen King’s latest collection of short stories.
A young man stands at a Wyoming railway halt. His train has been derailed, his girlfriend has abandoned him for the bright lights of town; the dregs of the sunset recently ‘faded to bitter orange’ over the Wind River mountains. He is about to discover, or at any rate to admit, that he’s dead. Around him on the platform the other benighted travellers huddle together like the cast of a 1940s movie: everyone is far too familiar with everyone else. Assembled here by circumstances beyond their control, they jeer at one another’s uncertainties while the High Plains wolves howl in the darkness and the relief train brings no relief.
Images of entrapment are central to many of the 13 stories in Just After Sunset. Most of them are lovingly specific. These chilling but mesmerizing stories will leave you wondering and wanting to read more.

MY SISTER’S KEEPER
By Jodi Picoult             
Published by Washington Square Press. £7.99

My Sister’s Keeper is a poignant, uplifting, emotional, sad, triumphant, passionate, heart wrenching and extremely powerful story about the Fitzgeralds, a family united in their love for each other but divided on exactly where the boundaries of family obligations, love and sacrifice should end. But it is, ultimately, a story of two sisters, the unbreakable bond they share and how totally entwined they have been all their lives until a crucial decision threatens to tear them apart and ends up changing all the lives forever.
The Fitzgeralds – Brian, a firefighter and avid amateur astronomer, and Sara, a stay-at-home mother and ex-lawyer, have the perfect suburban family, but life changes irreversibly when Kate, now sixteen, is diagnosed at age two with leukemia. Kate suffers from a type of leukemia which has a survival rate of 20-30%. The treatments keep the disease at bay for about five years, until Kate’s body explodes with runaway cancer cells. She desperately needs a bone marrow transplant or she will die. Her determined mother, on the advice of the doctor, persuades her husband to try for the ‘perfectly engineered baby.’
Their other child, Jesse, is not a match, but now at thirteen, Anna has always been aware that she was born for a specific purpose so that could she could be a bone marrow match for her sister Kate. When Kate needs leukocytes or stem cells or bone marrow ‘to fool her body into thinking it’s healthy,’ Anna has obediently stepped in. Every time Kate is hospitalized so is she, which means Anna can never go away to soccer camp or even to college.
Until now, Anna has never questioned her role in life. But with the prospect of being required to give a kidney she sues her parents for the right to make her own medical decisions.  A compelling read.