Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

This book is very interesting and it hooks you and grabs you and makes you want to read the next in the series. A very fun read and I am so glad I have 3 more to read. The only down side was in the beginning...I thought Bella was way too angry a teenager...but heck it has been so long since my girls were teenagers, maybe that is the way they are these days...

It is amazing the way the that the book involves you. I couldn't stop reading it. Is a lovely story that makes you believed that you are part of it.

I tried to like this book and its characters. But the dialog, descriptions and action made it impossible. Bella, the helpless heroine, was a responsible young woman until she started dating golden-boy vampire Edward. Maybe she was tired of pulling the weight that her mother should have. Maybe she was tired of being a teenager making adult decisions. Maybe she mistakes Edward's manipulation for love. All we know is that she's mesmerized by his good looks.

Edward looks like a 17-year-old god, but he's really a cranky hundred-year-old vampire enrolled in high school. He's attracted to Bella's scent (shampoo?) and the fact that he cannot read her mind--perhaps because Bella doesn't have independent thoughts around Edward. Whenever they are together, he makes every decision, including what Bella eats. He also follows her and breaks into her house to watch her sleep.

The banter, probably meant to be romantic and mysterious, is tedious and absurd."You're in danger with me. You shouldn't be with me. What are you thinking?" And so on.

What is Bella thinking, indeed. She is with a man who isn't sure whether he wants to kiss her or kill her. Yes, just a kiss: Edward is so strong that he is afraid he'll hurt her if they try to consummate their relationship. Not that the idea sounds appealing--Edward's hands, face, neck and presumably the rest of him are as hard and cold as marble in the moonlight. Though Bella is hot for him, she happily agrees to a platonic romance.

A similar variation on the theme of creepy men pursuing women is an episode of Sherlock Holmes called "The Solitary Cyclist." A man, Carruthers, starts following Violet, his employee, trying to protect her from his rough criminal friends instead of sending her out of harm's way. He calls it love; Watson calls it selfishness. In the end, Holmes has to stop Carruthers from killing her attacker, even though Carruthers knows he would hang for it. Edward faces no real danger or punishment for hunting down and killing Bella's (other) stalker. Edward is so physically strong and his coven so large that he never has to risk anything to protect Bella. Would he or his coven have faced execution for Bella?

And that's really all I have to say. This book was a huge disappointment for all I heard about it, completely with dismal one dimensional characters and a loose plot and complete sexism. Belle is a complete moron and I figured if I read one more word about how 'perfect' Edward Cullen is, I was going to just set the book on fire.

A mockery of literature. I can't believe this got published and became popular when there are millions of better things that could've been in it's place that didn't absolutely suck.

After several years of bugging by my younger sister, and all of the recent media hype, I finally broke down and read "Twilight" the first book in Stephanie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight Saga. After reading almost 500 pages in less than a week, I have a couple of things to say about Twilight.

1. It really does pull you in. Yes, there are parts of the book that are cheesy, and after a while you do get tired of hearing the vampire and teenage girl confess their love for each other, over, and over, and OVER again. But there is something about their pure teenage love that is kind of cute, in the same way that teen love is cute in teen movies.

2. There could be more character development. Both of the main characters, Edward and Bella, are pretty flat--Edward is perfect and Bella is swoony. But they're not overly annoying. I will be interested to see if they're still not annoying in three books.

3. Meyer uses a number of elements from other vampire books--especially stuff from Anne Rice, that I thought was a nice homage. I love Rice's vampire books, and it was good to see a tribute here.

Overall, I thought Twilight was okay. I didn't love it, but it did keep me reading, and I've been known to put down bad books. I will likely read the other three books in the series, and I'm not a tween. This is good clean vampire fun--worth a read by vampire fans and young readers.