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| Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephenie Meyer
Publisher: Topeka Bindery
Category: Book
List Price: $19.85
Buy New: $12.50
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New (11) Used (5) from $12.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  2789 reviews
Sales Rank: 377753
Media: Library Binding
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 498
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 1417755911
EAN: 9781417755912
ASIN: 1417755911
Publication Date: September 6, 2006
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| Customer Reviews:
 Glittery vampires? Oh yes. July 30, 2007
232 out of 263 found this review helpful
In a way I feel like the only teenage girl who really disliked this book and isn't head-over-heels for Edward Cullen and his God-like perfection. While I am perfectly aware that this is a YA novel and should be treated as such, even YA deserves some good ol' criticism sometimes. After all, nobody feels bad about ripping apart the Harry Potter books in a review, and they are aimed at an even younger audience.
Twilight could very well be the epitome of Mary Sue fiction. It read like something you would find on a fanfiction website and is clear from the very first chapter.
Bella Swan, the main character, moves to Forks, Washington, a city that seems to constantly be under siege by rain. She, of course, does not want to be here. She's not fond of her father; she misses her mother, but decides to make a great sacrifice by moving so her mother can travel with her baseball-playing boyfriend while Bella finishes school. From there the author blesses us with lines like: "Now my horrific day tomorrow would be just that much less dreadful.", and "It wasn't just physically that I'd never fit in. And if I couldn't find a niche in a school with three thousand people, what were my chances here?". If you haven't already guessed, Bella's life is terrible because she's shy. However, when she steps foot inside the school, despite her being oh-so depressed, cynical and stricken with a social phobia, she has already made a horde a friends and has boys on her tail, even if she isn't physically appealing. Still in the first chapter, she spots a family of flawless, gorgeous human beings. Here we meet the Cullen family- Edward Cullen in particular. Naturally, she is enchanted by them. Poor Bella finds that, by the power of cliche coincidence, she sits next to said Cullen in Biology. This is where the magic begins.
To make a long story short, her life is saved by Edward, she finds out he is a vampire and boom! They're in love. Madly, deeply in love. No suspense and no build-up at all. It just happens. All within the first few chapters. The rest of the book? Lots of smiling, glaring and explanations about Edward's gorgeous eyes, hair, smell and affection. Every time we see him, Bella comments on how his clothes bring out the muscular shape of his body and about his "beautiful crooked smile". Only within the last pages of the book do you get an exciting (which is up to interpretation) story that includes an antagonist. The first 400-some pages were as bland as bland can be.
The real fun is with the characters. They have no depth. They're almost laughable.
- Bella is beautiful but doesn't believe that she is, despite the fact that she has a vampire and the entire male population of her school drooling over her. Meyer tried to make her a strong heroine, but didn't quite make it. While she may write reports about misogyny in Shakespearean works, she also cooks and cleans for her lazy father who expects nothing less from her and follows Edward's every word religiously with no second thoughts.
- Edward is a brooding, angsty vampire with no flaws, perfect hair, beautiful eyes and a body to die for. Enough said.
- Edward's family members are cheerful (except for Rosalie. I think she was the only character I liked, because she was snarky and real) and, once again, flawless.
I finished the book and came online to see what other people had to say about it only to find that it had a rather large fanbase and tons of perfect reviews. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Different strokes for different folks as they say. I'm just a bit surprised that it is popular in some of the communities it is popular in- fanfiction writers who scoff at the idea of Mary Sue characters, for example, as if Bella and Edward can be excluded from this.
On the positive side, Stephanie Meyer has an interesting perspective on vampires: the fact that they can't sleep and some of the special abilities she gave them that not all vampires have and so on. Then again, she also made them glittery in the sunlight.
I've heard there are a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes in Twilight, but I did not notice them so I can't comment on it. I have poor grammar myself, so it is not as noticeable to me as it is to some people. *shrug*
what a stinkin piece of tosh August 7, 2007
217 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.
a redundant snooze-fest May 11, 2006
215 out of 308 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.
Sucks like a vampire on your neck January 19, 2008
212 out of 252 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.
I never knew vampires could be so boring. January 3, 2007
196 out of 263 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.
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