You have a point about the romance being obvious, but it was also quite cute, and for heaven's sake Katsa's a child soldier. She gets a little angst. I appreciated the idea of the "Graces" varying so much in importance (and what about the weather-discerning Grace from that captain, or the mind-reading young girl who had a cameo near the beginning? Or all the people mentioned in assorted armies who had various warlike Graces? They were pretty well distributed). I also thought the "survival" thing was decently set up, if not perfectly, and as for your "no-wait-he-was-really-a-pedophile" thing, that's a misreading of it. The impression I got was "no-wait-he-was-a-jerk-and-Katsa-was-a-panicking-kid-who-wasn't-thinking." He wasn't really a threat to her, but she was too young to have that kind of perspective.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

From what a friend has told me about the book, The Host is equally as Mary-Sueish and plotless.

Having thought about this for a bit, a lot of what I have seen from the Twilight series is actually a decent start at a good story. There are quite a few things that need to be tweaked and reworked, but that is true of all of us (admittedly, we don't call it good and publish it at that stage).

I am not sure I would classify it as a Troll.

Different views on vampires...I can live with that. It's overly dramatic a lot, but I can live with that as well.

The only major problem that I have seen in the whole deal is Bella. She has no redeeming qualities and, as far as I can tell, no real thought process. She does things without ever thinking about anything. If she were to be a more real character, we might not even be having this discussion.

I suppose my closing thoughts on this would be: It is possible for a good writer to write something that is sub-par, that doesn't necessarily make the literature in question a Troll.