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| Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephenie Meyer
Publisher: Little, Brown Young Readers
Category: Book
List Price: $10.99
Buy New: $4.95
You Save: $6.04 (55%)
New (85) Used (87) from $4.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  2511 reviews
Sales Rank: 2
Media: Paperback
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0316015849
EAN: 9780316015844
ASIN: 0316015849
Publication Date: September 6, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 a redundant snooze-fest May 11, 2006
227 out of 338 found this review helpful
This book was: Contrived, languid, repetitive and vapid.
Meaning it was a slow-moving, overly crafted knock off of every other "romantic" vampire novel written. Meyer had a few good ideas, like the venom theory, but reading about yet another clutzy, slow-witted, dull heroine becoming an inexplicably fasicnating love object to yet another beautiful immortal who despite his many eons lacks the imagination to latch on to anything more interesting should have us all giving up on the vampire genre all together.
Reading this book dragged like a government job, with the exception of pages 374 through 422 where the story briefly picks up and looks like it might actually go somewhere beyond the silly infantile romantic lingerings of Bella & Edward. (wonderbread, anyone?) Don't be fooled, it dosen't.
I'm guessing Meyer was trying to make an arguement for chemistry to explain an attraction that makes no sense at all. But I got bored because repeating a half-formed sentiment over and over is not really an explaination. Unless you are sleep deprived there is nothing to gain from this rather empty literary exercise.
what a stinkin piece of tosh August 7, 2007
207 out of 272 found this review helpful
I am disapointed by how many teen girls think this is the best literature avaliable. This book has practically no substance. Unless you count endless discriptions of Edward Cullens "amber eyes and full lips". I am not exagerating when I say that if these discriptions were taken out the book would be about half its size. Bella, the main charactor, is pathetic and boring. She practically passes out every time Edward (her gorgeous vampire boyfriend) comes in a room, it is rediculous.
The whole book is basically: "Today I went to school. Edward gave me a ride home. I couldn't speak for his amber eyes were oh so mesmerizing! When I got home I made dinner for my father and cleaned the entire house. Then I got myself into mortal danger and Edward saved me. His eyes are soooo amber and mesmerizing."
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK
When I first read it I absoulutely loved it. Then I realised how utterly stupid it is and how degrading and antifeminist. EXAMPLE: Edward stalks Bella and watches her at night. Bella is flattered. After I came to my senses I was a bit humiliated I ever liked Twilight.
If you must read it, fine, but I warned you. Just think about how this is a romance between a 100+ year old and a 17 year old.
ALSO- It is an insult to Harry Potter to even be mentioned in the same sentence with this book.
I never knew vampires could be so boring. January 3, 2007
201 out of 278 found this review helpful
I think my biggest gripe about this book is that the protagnist has NOTHING going for her outside of the fact that she catches a vampire's eye. She has no hopes, no apirations, no dreams, no hobbies. She cooks for her loser father and placates her shallow mother, and that's IT. And I suppose it aggravates me that the vampire falls for her, because I can't figure out what's so interesting about her. For someone who has been around for 100 years, one would think they'd go for the bizarre or truly unique, instead of shoes that any faint-hearted strumpet could fill. But perhaps that's the book's rather vapid appeal.
The rules of the vampires are somewhat original, but I think if they glowed like solar diamonds in the sun they'd be a lot more obvious.
Sucks like a vampire on your neck January 19, 2008
192 out of 231 found this review helpful
I bought this book because I believed all the hype. Silly me! I fell for that ploy yet again. It seems these days that sometimes the bigger the hype, the bigger the disappointment I'll feel.
Usually I don't write a review before I've finished reading a book. But I've read over 200 pages of 'Twilight', and I'm not sure if I can bear reading the rest, so I think I may as well review it now.
How best to describe this book? Hmmm...
Remember back to when you were a little kid in school, and your teacher would set you an essay-writing assignment on 'What I Did At School Today'? Well, this book reads like one of those essays, only it goes on and on and on and on and on, day after day after day...I don't get why it's so important to tell us EVERY SINGLE CLASS that Bella goes to at school, for months on end, especially if it's totally irrelevant to the storyline. It's like reading someone's school diary, the kind that outlines which classes to go to at which times each day and which assignments are due, but leaves out any of the juicier, more interesting gossip you'd get in a normal diary. And the same goes for Bella's homelife - we get to hear what she eats and when, what she does for homework, exactly how well she slept each night, and so on, every day. And it's almost never interesting facts that are relevant, it's dry, boring, repetitious stuff. Bella's life is so DULL, I think you could read instruction manuals for watching paint dry that were less boring. Ugh! If my pillows were this overstuffed with fluff and filler, I'd have to sleep almost in a sitting-up position.
And Bella was annoying. Whingy, self-centred, quite rude to her 'friends' at times, and totally lacking a sense of humour or a modicum of intelligence or any genuine concern for anyone other than herself or her pretty boy boyfriend, she grated on my nerves like a constantly dripping tap. I could understand why no one at her old school liked her. I couldn't understand, though, why everyone at her new school seemed to treat her like royalty and wanted to be with her constantly, right from day one of her arriving there.
Using first person narrative can be a wonderful thing, in the hands of a good writer - it can be used to convey the central character's feelings and thoughts and motivations so much more effectively than third-person narrative. But this author wasted this opportunity, and gave us practically nothing in the way of the narrator's personality, or nothing positive, anyway, unless you think that being a whingy sociopath is a positive. The other trap with using first person narrative as a writer is that you can fall into the trap of making too many 'I' statements, which gets really dull, or even annoying. This author fell right into that trap. It wasn't uncommon to find an entire, long paragraph where every sentence began with 'I' (like on page 114, for instance). Perhaps if the character of Bella had thought about others more often, instead of just herself, or had made witty commentary about current events or what was going on around her, she wouldn't have had a need to start so many sentences with 'I'. Clearly, a very self-centred character, written by an author lacking in imagination or experience, or so it would seem.
And the hero of the piece, Edward, was dull - his only features seemed to be his unbelievably godlike good looks and his flashy car. I want more to my heroes than that, thankyou. And as for the other characters in the book, we learn practically nothing about them - they only seem to exist to help or interact with the heroine; they don't seem to have any lives or character or quirks of their own.
I found this book REALLY painful. I hate quitting, and I usually see books through to the end. But this one is so bad, I don't know that I'll be able to force myself to finish it, and I don't think I should - I'm just not a fan of masochism. I've been having to force myself to read it, for a few minutes at a time, here and there, over months, just to get to page 200+. Spending time with this book is like being forced to visit relatives I don't like - I sit there, lamenting that I don't like them, that I have nothing in common with them, that they're about as exciting as a day spent staring at the wall, that it is a waste of my valuable time to be there, and I count down the minutes until I can escape. Better that I had never visited them in the first place - in other words, better that I had never started reading this book in the first place.
I think that if I crave any vampire tales in future, I'll just stick to watching Buffy reruns or reading Patricia Briggs' wonderful 'Mercy Thompson' series of books. I definitely won't be reading any more of Stephenie Meyer's books, anyway.
reads like bad, bland slash fiction January 20, 2008
145 out of 174 found this review helpful
I may just sue Ms. Meyer as it is possible that she stole the fabric covered books I wrote my own fantasy novels in when I was 13 - this book is written in the exact same style. The protagonist is a "slender" brunette, apparently so lovely that boys fall over her as soon as she arrives at her new school, including a superior and (as we are continuously told so as to avoid actual description) "godlike" and gorgeous vampire who never bothered with any other girl until he was spellbound at first sight (and evidently, smell). This is not a typical YA novel heroine considering most readers cannot identify or sympathize with someone so amazing and physically attractive. Then I took a look at the author... oh yes, I get it now. We have a term for this and it is MARY SUE. The author has made the main character a thinly veiled perfection of herself and provided absolutely no personality to the character. In fact, every character in this book is barely even a cardboard cut out - no one has any real personality beyond some fleeting stereotypes and everyone behaves predictably and completely unconvincingly. It is like reading "slash" fiction, as Edward only speaks in that way that only exists in slash - males do not act like this in real life, they do not poke you gently on the nose, beg you to tell them ALL about every minute detail of your life and treat you like a newborn baby. Only in slash. Of course this book doesn't even have any sex in it - why? because (as I understand it - remember nothing here makes sense) if he makes love to her he may squash her head like a grape. I'm not making this up people.
I adore YA novels but this is livejournal-post quality, not bound published book quality. With that said, it is possible that this may be one of the few instances where the movie might be better than the book. Actors can breathe life into the characters, and the simplistic writing will most likely not show through. Hopefully Edward's tiresome and silly "push me pull you" act will take up no more than a few minutes of screen time. It takes up almost all of this sad little book.
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