Twilight
If it were possible to give this book zero stars, I would do so. I read this book while on the train from Chicago to St. Louis. It's a thick book, but I was able to get through the entire thing by using this tactic: after the first few chapters, I skipped all the paragraphs devoted to telling the reader how attractive the vampires were. This allowed me to skip roughly a paragraph per page. Sometimes a long paragraph.
I would put good money on a teenager being able to write better prose than this author. Sentences are bland and there's little description of anything that isn't Edward's face. Dialogue is stilted, and there's very little character development beyond the eternal "will he love me or kill me" debate.
When Bella moves in with her Father, he gives her a truck. This truck belonged to his friend, who doesn't need it anymore because he suddenly became paralyzed. This is apparently because people in wheelchairs never modify their cars to compensate for a driver who can't move his or her legs, and even if they did people who know their way around cars would never be capable of doing that. The reader never finds out how the Father's friend became paralyzed or how his recovery goes, and Bella doesn't care a whit about it. The character's entire purpose is so that Bella has an excuse to have a truck and interact with Jacob.
Before this book became famous, some editor really should have told the author about unintentional humor/irony. Vampires are demonic creatures. But they were described as looking angelically handsome so many times I had to wonder whether the author was a moron or trying to be funny.
In addition, if I was a mother to a young girl, I would by no means want her reading this series. It teaches her that: it's okay for a boy to break into her house and watch her sleep without her knowledge or consent; a boy telling her who she can and cannot associate with is just being romantic; not knowing whether or not he is going to kill her is an attractive trait in a potential partner; it's absolutely okay to neglect friendships in favor of a boyfriend (because true love is worth anything!); her boyfriend and his family can make decisions about her safety without consulting her parents or seriously considering her opinion; and life is not worth living without a boyfriend. If this book was taken as an example of what society should be like, women's rights would be set back at least 50 years.
This book wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. I feel bad a tree had to die so it could be made. It really gets me that the author got rich off of this.
