Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) Review

	Manufacturer: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Author(s): Stephenie Meyer Binding: Paperback Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars	Retail Price: ~~$10.99~~ Online Sale Price: $6.05 Save $4.94 Today! * Price is subject to change. This item qualifies for Free Super Saver Shipping!
Features: ISBN13: 9780316015844 Condition: USED - GOOD Notes:

Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Isabella, the person Edward holds most dear. The lovers find themselves balanced precariously on the point of a knife-between desire and danger.Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.

User Submitted Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) Reviews

March 11, 2010
first book report
I was given the book Eclipse by my daughter for Christmas, the third book in the series, which I read in less than a day. I decided maybe I should start by reading the series from the beginning so I could understand what the third book was all about.I must say that from the moment I received the book and started reading it I could not put it down. It's touching and conflicting. How Edward didn't understand the "emotions" he was feeling and his over-protectiveness for Bella, which at times he got just a little carried away with.It's a wonderful love story with quite a twist.
I later bought the movie and the rest of the books. All I can say is Stephenie Meyer, kudos to you for writing such wonderful and conflicting stories about true love.

March 10, 2010
As a struggling writer, I'm offended
Twilight centers on the developing romance between star-crossed flirters Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. Problem is, Bella and Edward have no chemistry. He's a 100 year-old vampire. She's a helpless, self-conscious klutz. They don't do anything together except look at each other. They have nothing in common--except they're both virgins--and so they talk about nothing.

Oh, sure, they talk about the weather, music, and their favorite color, but nothing important like what they believe in or their values. These conversations about nothing are fraught with artificial tension and abused facial expressions. There's a glower, a simper, a chuckle, a smirk, a sigh, a blush after EVERY laborious exchange. It's meant to be engrossing and edgy, but it's distracting and silly. Edward the Emo shifts moods from cocky to lustful to angry to protective in the blink of an eye. Bella's range of emotions exists between expressing embarassment for her clumsiness and awe of Edward's smooth skin, his sculpted chest, his fiery eyes, etc.

The story is told from Bella's perspective. She's your typical upper-middle-class teenager: spoiled, snobbish, and uninteresting. After moving to Forks, Washington, she looks down on her high school classmates because they are nice and emotionally engaged. She acquires friends effortlessly and for no other reason than to have someone to sit with at lunch. Invitations extended to her to go shopping, to go to the beach, and to go to the high school dance she treats with ambivalence if not distaste.

She placates these little people by pretending to enjoy their company, but she is really just biding her time, waiting for love. When Edward enters her life, she drops all pretense.

Edward, as described through the eyes of Bella, is just as one-dimensional and unlikable. He's brooding, intelligent, good-looking...basically a fantasy realized. Stephenie Meyer spares an editor to overwhelm us with descriptions of Edward with SAT words like "sinuous" and "translucent." In addition to his beauty, Edward doesn't eat, doesn't breathe, sparkles in the sunlight, has super strength, super speed, super scent, venomous fangs, and the ability to read minds. How did he get these powers? Because he's a vampire, of course!

I understand Bella's attraction to Edward--young women are often attracted to jerks--but I can't understand what Edward likes about her. Actually, I can't deduce ANY motivation behind Edward's actions. It seems to me that, aged 100 years, he would have weightier things on his mind than seducing the new girl in town. It is as if Stephenie Meyer decided the Cullens would be vampires in the middle of the process of writing the book. But this revelation renders Edward's "cover" as a high school student--and thus how he meets Bella in the first place--a ridiculous charade.

There are no bad guys, no challenge or foreseeable goal for the characters to struggle toward or overcome. So it's no surprise Meyer first introduces a hint of a theme about 1/4 of the way through the book, when Bella meets Jacob. He's the best character in the book because he's the least pretentious. Just when you think the book might be going somewhere with him, he all but disappears until the end.

The absence of a story necessitates that Bella entertain us with the plot points of her day-to-day life, such as surfing the Internet, cooking for her dad, finding a space in the student parking lot, and reading Jane Austen (no coincidence; Edward is very much like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice). Pages upon pages are filled with Bella's babbling to herself about her dreadful, boring life and about Edward.

Realizing that she'd written a whole novel in which nothing happened, Meyer introduces the antagonists of the book 100 pages from the end: a coven of vampires on the prowl. It starts innocently enough. They ask to join the Cullens' intramural baseball game in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Then it turns ugly as a member of the visiting team gets a whiff of Bella's blood. The Cullens whisk Bella away to a hotel in Phoenix for her safety while Edward pursues the bad guy to Vancouver. The deliberate precaution to ensure Bella's safety backfires completely, but the contrived international flair is halfway redeeming.

As a writer myself, I struggle to establish textured settings, empathetic characters, and a compelling plot. I establish tension early on and sustain it throughout the story. Unless there is something at stake, there is no point in writing more. I make my characters just neurotic enough that they surprise you once or twice when the course of the plot depends on his/her actions. This takes a lot of work that doesn't necessarily come through in the finished book, but believe me, it's necessary to write well.

Twilight lacks effort on all these fronts. Its success is indeed a phenomenon, but the writing is not.

March 10, 2010
Twilight
I think the twilight saga has an incredible storyline to it, and has many parts to it that are unique. A lot of people criticize parts of the books (e.g. some of the features), but I think that the fact is that they don't like some of the small change Stephenie Meyer has made to vampires, so they critize it because it isn't the same.

March 9, 2010
Collector's Edition
This has to be my ultimate favorite book and love the style, print and cover.

March 9, 2010
Young Love Bites
Ty Webb once said that a flute with only one hole isn't really a flute, and a donut without a hole is a danish. It was true then and it's true now, and a remarkably prescient preface to one's immersion into the pimply, purple world Meyer has created.

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