Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I feel I should start this review with a disclaimer: I am not the target audience for this book. Perhaps if I were, my review would be quite different, since the popularity of this book indicates that the writing holds appeal to one group or another.

That said, Twilight is a strange book. Now, I love a good vampire story, I really do. I also love a bad vampire story, because let's face it - vampires are awesome. The modern-day vampires are monsters, and that appeals to the tough little kid in all of us, and they are tragic romantic heroes, and that appeals to the wide-eyed and full of wonder little kid in all of us. But Twilight isn't so much a book about vampires as it is about restraint. So much restraint perhaps, that it approaches the idealized courtly love of a medieval story from a young adult book of the early 21st century.

The story centers around Bella Swan, a young lady (high school junior) who moves back to the Pacific Northwest to get away from her mother and her mother's new boyfriend. The first third of the book must be much maligned in the Pacific Northwest, because the major feature of that section of the book is discussing how much the Pacific Northwest is terrible. Bella really honestly hates it, until she spots Edward, whose major personality feature seems to be that he's gorgeous and that he doesn't want to hang around with Bella.

After a rocky start and some admittedly decent set-up, Bella realizes Edward is a vampire and their courtship starts. It basically consists of Bella wanting to know Edward better (in every sense of the word) and Edward insisting he's dangerous. Edward's claims of danger are undermined by his a. inability to leave Bella alone and b. the fact that nothing about him seems dangerous in any way. His thirst for blood is under control. His reaction time is so inhumanly fast that nothing can hurt him (or anyone with him). He insists that if he lost control he could really hurt Bella, but his control is so exacting we never believe him. He doesn't even burst in to flame in the sunlight... he just sparkles. In the end, we're left wondering what the downside is to being a vampire, and why he's so dead-set against allowing Bella to become one.

There's really not much to recommend for this book or the series. The book is paced oddly, spending most of the book on set-up of the world they live in and what vampires are. The characters are often one-dimensional; Bella is inhumanely distant emotionally, and inhumanly clumsy physically. Edward doesn't have much going for him, in terms of personality. Bella's father seems to exist only because she has to have one parent or another to live where she does. And most of the other humans in the book (with the possible exception of the Native Americans) are written in such a way as you feel they do nothing but compare, poorly, to the vampires...

And yet...I can’t help but want to know what happens to these characters next. I can't explain why. But I'm very, very interested in reading the rest of the series. Which can only mean that even if I can't identify it, there must be something right about this series. Off to read New Moon now. - Reviewed by John