While We Wait for Breaking Dawn...: The Host by Stephanie Meyers

Young adult readers who are anxiously awaiting the August 2 publication of Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4) (in which the heroine Bella must decide to join with Edward Cullen in marriage and in eternal, albeit non-human, life as a vampire) have something to keep them reading. Meyer's forthcoming science fiction thriller The Host: A Novel is set for publication May 6.

A slight departure from the fantasy thriller genre, this new title has an equally innovative plot, in which an extraterrestrial species invades Earth, not through warfare, but by insinuating their worm-like beings into the brains of humans and thus taking over their physical bodies. Most human minds succumb to the takeover, while a few uninfected humans flee and set up rebel camps temporarily out of reach of the "body snatching" occupation force. One human soul, however, refuses to succumb to the takeover, and Melanie's mind co-exists in her brain along with that of its interloper, who calls herself "Wanderer."

The plot takes off when Melanie's resistant soul interacts with that of Wanderer, persuading her to search the desert for Melanie's rebel brother Jamie, who is in hiding with Jared, the boy she loves. Wanderer, too, has a missing soulmate somewhere on Earth, and the two, "the host" and the invader, sharing one body and one set of needs and still human emotions, begin the pilgrimage to find their true loves.

It's an intriguing story line, both as a romance and as science fiction. According to Publisher's Weekly and other advance reviewers, the warfare between Earthlings and Extraterrestrials takes place here not on battlefields but within the conjoined minds and souls of The Host and The Wanderer. Meyer's vampire saga has proven that she is capable of sustaining characters trapped between two worlds, and it is sure to be interesting to see how she works out this familiar theme inside this new premise.