Twilight Review

Meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 498 pp.
Romance/Thriller/Fiction, New York Times Editor's Choice, Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2006

Synopsis
Isabella Swan, or Bella as she prefers to be called, moves from her sunny Pheonix home to live with her dad in Forks, Washington on the Olympic Pennisula. She is immediatly attracted and falls steadily in love with the charming and remarkably handsome Edward Cullen. Through uncanny twists and turns of their burgeoning relationship, Bella begins to wonder if Edward is even human at all.

Evaluations
Meyer's Bella and Edward are composed well and work against eachother to provide enough dramitic and emotional effect on an imaginative reader. Edward is aptly written to be wise beyond his stated seventeen years yet giddy with the feeling of a first love. Bella may be someone that young readers can identify with. Her social awkwardness and physical uncoordination tempered with her mature sarcasm and child-like vulnerabilty makes the reader empathize with her follies and plights. Meyer's physical descriptions and developing chararter sketches of Edward and Bella, against the backdrop of the Washington forests, certainly make their scenes vivid and fully illustrated.

Meyer's uses her descriptive lens to adequately compose the supporting cast of Twilight. The other members of the Cullen family are just as beautiful and alluring as Edward, but with their own personality quirks and secrets (which the reader uncovers in the sequels). Jacob Black and his father Billy, Quilete Indians on the La Push Reservation, provide the hint of mystery behind Edward's family and provide potential conflict for Bella's relationship with them.

The story line was interesting. What would happen if a vampire and a human fell in love? What if he fought every urge not to kill her just to be near her? Meyer's book doesn't offer much movement so much as development between the characters so the reading can go a bit slow. In adolescent literature terms, Twilight provides an endearing emotional glimpse of young love, especially a first love and all of its trials and tribulations. Social acceptance among and between all if the characters is a theme which young readers will immediately understand and/or connect with. Another item worth metioning is Bella's relationship with her father. This addresses the needs and independence of a teenage girl and an estranged father's reluctance to grant them. The book, as whole, doesn't seem to address multicultural issues other than the fantastic (e.g. How are the Cullens accepted or not accepted into the mainstream of Forks society?)

This is definately a book reserved for independant reading as part of a course curriculum and is appropriate through the ages of 14-100+.

Personal Reactions
I thought that this book was gruelingly slow and, at times, felt I was reading a cleaned version of a Harlequin romance. I wondered if Bella's reluctance to believe what Edward is moved to quickly or early in the book. It seems as though Meyer's counters her jolting plot twists with Bella's first person point of view and her honesty towards the reader to accurately describe everything that she sees and feels. Most of the supporting characters are just that, support from cut scences to pages upon pages of Bella and Edward's conversations. It seemed as though Bella's schoolmates and family served as crutches to move the plot in a forward direction. To Meyer's defense, the story unfolds smoothly enough to be semi-believable as an adult romance but much too quickly for a high school fling. Again, I suspect that this may have something to do with Edward's own maturity and wisdom (and the age-old vampire art of seduction) and Bella's own mutual attraction. Overall, I thought that Twilight wasn't an awful book, but I wouldn't enthusiasticly recommend it to readers that desire more action and interaction than what Meyer's is willing to gives us in this first installment.