Book Review: Twilight

I probably should have done this when I first read the book about a year ago. But hey, better late than never right? And with the movie about to come out on DVD, what better time to discuss the book?

NOTE: There will be spoilers in this review. If for some reason you haven't read them or at least don't know the story, you may not want to continue reading.

THE BASICS: Twilight, begins about the same way as the Twilight movie, namely, some angsty teenage girl named Isabella Swan, Bella for short, who is pretty and perfect moves in with her father for unknown reasons and hates her new life, despite the fact that she chose to go there, and hates the people 'cause they're so dang friendly. Until one day, she meets this emo, pale looking boy who always talks about her death and how dangerous he is. He is, and I quote, a "god-like", "gorgeous", and "spawn of Adonis" type being and we are annoyingly reminded of that fact ever other paragraph (and I am not kidding on that). Also, he's a vampire who wants to eat her. I don't know about you, but this would kind of turn me off.

But of course, Bella, being obviously retarded, falls in love with him and declares that she "can't live without him" and Edward, as the emo vamp is called, feels the same way. They've seen each other for little over a month when that statement is said.

TECHNICAL STUFF: Despite being around 600 pages long, this book can be swallowed in less than a day. One, because it's in large print, and two, because the writing is disturbingly simple. Reading this book, I felt I was being talked down to. The word usage is...... questionable. It felt like the author went through with a thesaurus and just changed all the words to something fancy.

THE THEME: This book has a surprisingly negative message it's giving to people, young girls especially, as they are the target audience. I think the message the author was trying to give was the basic "true love conquers all" type thing and, while this does kind of work when forcibly inserted, the message I got was completely different. Bella's life completely circled around Edward. All her time was spent with him or thinking about him and all her hobbies had something to do with him. Edward however, did have hobbies and had a life, however drab and mellow. He made all the decision and, if Bella ever disagreed, he would woo her into seeing it his way. This screams abusive relationship. Now, perhaps if this had been an actual plot device and the author had used this, then I would have been ok with it. Because it wouldn't have been so masked in fluff and romance. Now, what is this teaching little preteen girls?

OVERALL: I don't hate this book. While it's kind of stupid at times, it has it's clever vices. Also, the mythology is very interesting. With the exception of the "glittering" I think it's almost better than normal mythos. Is the book good? No. It's actually really bad. Not apocalypticly bad though ( I reserve that title for some of the other in the series). But it really tries to be liked, and in that it succeeds more than it fails.

GRADE: C