Review: Twilight, Stephanie Meyer

Title: Twilight
Author: Stephanie Meyer
Date Begun: June 20, 2007
Date Completed: June 20, 2007

Stephanie Meyer seems like a pretty nice person (with tragic music taste), so it made me sad when I didn't like Twilight even a little bit. I would have been sadder if I'd paid money for it though.

You're probably thinking "You're reading Twilight now? Way to lose track of the YA literature bandwagon there." And you have a point. The Stephanie Meyer phenomenon is well-documented already. But the third novel is coming out this summer, and it didn't seem too inappropriate to review the first one.

Stuck somewhere between a romance novel and a television show, Twilight follows (Isa)Bella Swan through her move to a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Bella narrates, a tactic I found easier to handle if I thought of Angela Chase's voice doing the narration instead. Normally, this would be a compliment. Really, there's probably nothing wrong with Bella - I sympathize with anyone who is abnormally pale and has to move half-way through high school (been there). But it would be nice if she'd exhibited a personality that was a little less clingy.

Even clingy would have been all right, maybe, if she'd clung to someone other than Edward Cullen. Because frankly, Edward Cullen is kind of a dick. He's high-handed and autocratic, he constantly talks down to Bella and wraps himself up in his own immortal angst. Traits that maybe Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer could have pulled off in a hero don't work here. Even if he was born in 1901, the novel was written in the twenty-first century. I found myself cheering for Jacob Black - a side character in Twilight who seems to come to more prominence in the sequels. Jacob's a sweetheart and probably has his own sources of angst, a more unusual combination than anything Edward Cullen offers even if he is really Henry Cavill. (Henry Cavill was good at being a sweetheart with unsuspected level angst in I Capture the Castle, for what it's worth.)

Twilight isn't egregiously bad. The writing is fine, and as mentioned Bella has her own redeeming qualities. But if I want to hear about angsty love with gorgeous and autocratic vampires? Well, I've already got Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD, thanks.