Genre: Young-adult vampire/romance
Synopsis: It is the first book of the Twilight series, and introduces seventeen-year-old Isabella "Bella" Swan who moves from Arizona, to Forks, Washington, and finds her life in danger when she falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen.
The novel is followed by New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn.
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Review: It should be said Stephanie’s vision of a world with vampires and a forbidden love is one with raw potential, but relatively poor and unoriginal execution. The raw potential lies within ideas she never expands upon, but merely hints at.
One of the primary elements I notice about any book is it’s writing style. This is one of the areas wherein I feel Stephanie has potential she does not draw upon. The use of first-person perspective is probably the best element in a way, but unfortunately Bella isn’t imaginative enough to provide us with a riveting narrative. In fact, the most common criticism of Bella is that she has no personality anyway. Her repetition of adjectives in particular bothers me; Edward is a bronze-haired marble statue. That is the one thing I will never, ever forget about this book. The only problem I really have with the first person perspective is that it prevents an exploration of the vampire world which I will address later in this post. For example, the movie recognized the need to have Victoria, Laurant and James hunting, killing and providing a sense of tension/danger throughout the movie. I think Meyer would have benefited from including the occasional short third-person perspective chapter in which she made accounts of such things.
My next problem is character development – I feel the characters develop (and not much at that) around the plot, as opposed to the plot developing as a result of the characters. We’re never really given any reason why Edward falls in love with Bella, (notably it seems to happen overnight*) or why Alice and Bella get along so well – they don’t seem to have a single thing in common. They just get on because they do. It makes the story feel a little forced.
As I’ve said, Bella’s personality is questionable. Edward is portrayed as perfect, which is the exact opposite of Bella and just as bad. Possibly the only redeeming feature of this perfection is that objectively he IS an obsessive/possessive guy with anger issues. However, since we never see him objectively in the book, it may take a reading of the Midnight Sun Partial Draft to realise just how messed up he is.**
The plot itself could be worse, the beginning is boring at worst and a little repetitive at best. The first run through Biology and P.E. and so on is bearable. The third or fourth time through, its just monotonous, and then suddenly the vampire side takes over. This is very interesting in parts, but again, skips the depth to give the cutesy fangirl scenes. The climax is done pretty well, and the post-climax ‘epilogue’ as it were is a bit generic. Notably, the climax scene's transition to the cinema screen was superb. Of all the scenes in the movie this is perhaps the most in-tact one, and its superb. Back to the book: The various central scenes, independent of their relation to each other work well. Any reader will remember ‘the meadow scene’ or ‘the restaurant scene’. While they are enjoyable certainly, and Meyer employs some great dialogue throughou - the forced sense of relations between these scenes is what makes the plot seem to be in control rather than the characters. (For example, everybody has the same classes, the secondary characters just sort of stop showing up later in the book, and where it is convenient for the plot to skip a few days or weeks because Edward isn't around, it just does.)
The portrayal of vampires is of course essential to making the book good – and this is yet another key area where Meyer’s idea is not exposed to its full potential. I think seeing the story through Bella’s eyes only allowed us a glimpse into their world when a proper exploration would have been rewarding. My only real problem with the vampires is that they sparkle in the sunlight. I don’t think ANYBODY thought that was a good move, we’re just willing to endure it.They also suffer from poor characterization, each has a rather one-dimensional role to play. (Alice is the prophet, Rosalie is the skeptic and so on.) Carlisle however is a wonderful character who I think was too understated throughout the book, playing the creator and the link between good and evil – he IS the gray area the book so badly needs throughout all its elements.
Having said all that, for a light-hearted read it is a thoroughly enjoyable book. I love this series, the only reason I am so bitter about the writing standard being that of Young Adult level is that the premises of all four books are worthy of so much more. I would recommend it to anyone not looking for too much depth to their fantasies.
* I think that this was purely poor execution on Meyer’s part – I would recommend the Partial Draft of Midnight Sun to any Twilight fan, its not complete but at the very least it provides a new layer to the story which deepens it immensely. Meyer's biggest flaw I think, is that she writes stories with a certain view in her head (for example, being aware over a certain length of time that Edward was falling in love with Bella) while what we read is essentially "The next day, Edward was in love with Bella." You could argue that "since it's seen through Bella's eyes, thats the way it SHOULD be -" but in that case, Bella must have a few screws loose to so easily accept this bad tempered disappearing act loves her.
** This is most evident in the above mentioned Midnight Sun Partial Draft, without Bella’s biased eyes portraying perfection. Notably, even with this additional layer, Edward is still a pretty forced character who Meyer obviously dreamt about as a teen, resulting in a severve lack of realism.
Rating: 2.5/5
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