Twilight

WARNING: Pessimistic Blog!

So I got this book, young adult, of course, since that's what I write and I like to read my genre. It had several things going for it: 1) Cool cover, black and white image of hands holding a red apple, 2) girl moves to a new town only to discover vampires live there, 3) 570 pages (doesn't that mean a bunch of people thought it would be a worthy volume??), and 4) good press.

It took me forever to wade through the first 300 pages. I don't even know why I kept reading. I liked the characters okay, but it really seemed like the author Stephenie (with all e's) Meyer was trying to write out a girlhood fantasy about loving a vampire boy with beautiful white skin and rippling muscles. He's dangerous and so beautiful. No one understands him. No one knows the pain he's suffered through.

Fine. I can buy into that for a while. But really, after 100 pages or so I started really wondering what the book was supposed to be about. There has to be more conflict than forbidden love in a vampire story. Bella hears all of the stories about Edward Cullen and his family and is intrigued. Okay. What else? So about 2/3 of the way through, there finally was some real drama when a small group of nomad vampires discovered Bella among the Cullen family and the main nomad vampire James wanted to get him some of that.

The book could have been a great suspense tale of about 300 pages, but the author felt the need to set up what I think she thought was some intricate character details. Really I didn't feel like the background of any of them needed to be as drawn out as it was. The humans, anyway. She needed more background on the vampire characters.

But good news! There's a sequel. My Woman says I can't read it. Apparently I bitched too much about this one as I read. But I probably will check it out. I do like the story about the Cullens and their little vampire commune.

Naturally the thing that gets me the most is that this book was published with what I consider MASSIVE editing problems. I think it could have been the stellar read that so many teen girls are saying it is. But as it is, it's far too wordy and convoluted. And it's too bad. I think she's really onto something with her vampire commune. I hope the sequel is better. Maybe she'll pull a JK Rowling and just get better with each book.

There, I tried to end on a more non-pessimist note. Did it work?