The Verdict is In

I saw the movie Twilight before I read the book. I thought the acting was horrid. The characters were so flat and one-dimensional. I couldn't relate or anything to the movie. So, I decided that the book HAD to be better than the movie (not that it was much of a challenge). I wanted to see what all the hype was about and really give it a chance to be worth my time. Plus, I wanted to get back into reading. When our emergency trip to Pittsburgh came up, I figured I could finish reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( I had been reading it off and on for a few months) and start/finish Twilight. It was a looong flight, so I had time and then some. I went ahead and read the book and I wasn't able to really give you all a proper review because I had so much to catch up on at work. Sorry! In a nutshell, PASS. As for New Moon...

Within the first 20 pages I was already over Bella. How can someone be sooooo miserable. All. The. Time. All she does is whine and complain and find more ways to be more miserable. Even when she's "happy". It gets worse when Edward leaves her and she is depressed for MONTHS. Each page that she narrates feels like a month's worth of reading. It was excruciating!

Enters Jacob. Jacob's character may have saved the book in my honest opinion. He's such an unpretentious and real character, up until the whole werewolf bit. It's just very easy to like him. The whole Bella-Jacob love thing was also much more believable than the Bella-Edward story. The author actually took the time to develop their attraction and you almost fall in love with them as their relationship develops. It wasn't carnal like Bella and Edward whereby Edward was attracted to Bella like a fat kid to chocolate cake and Bella was attracted to Edward like the fly that is attracted to the pretty blue light of a bug zapper. When Bella is with Jacob, she is ALMOST likable. It's as if she's a different person. She laughs, she jokes, she's NORMAL.

Unfortunately, Edward makes a re-appearance after a very coincidental series of events. This causes a rift in her relationship with Jacob. Bella is sad, again. Then the book ends. Yes, it ends just like that.

I blame a lot of the faults in the series on the author, Stephenie Meyer. It's as if she was a desperate housewife and in between breastfeeding her kid, decided that she would write a book about a girl who falls in love with a vampire and lives vicariously through her characters. Clearly, she never bothered to research the subject of vampires because apparently, vampires have all sorts of special powers except shoot fireworks out of their asses. She went against such widelly accepted vampire traits that it was just a slap in the face! Just when things were starting to get "good" she would underdevelop the scene and leave you high and dry. What would have been a good sequence of events would be done in two pages. I don't know if she had the intention to target teenagers with her book, but you can definitely tell that it is written at their level. If you wanted to improve your reading speed...highly recommended. In the time it takes you to pinch a loaf, you'll have read 25 pages. MINIMUM! Vocabulary, not so much. There were a few instances where you know that she busted out her Thesaurus and found some "big" words to replace her overly simplistic prose with; words like hyperbole and chastise as opposed to exaggerate and punish.

All in all, I don't see the allure the series has on adults. I can see where teenagers that still have the romanticized and idyllic notions of love would love to place themselves in Bella's shoes. But I just don't know how adults do it. It's a teenage Harlequin series!!! Not even a sex scene to hold you over! Don't get me wrong, I'm still a romantic and love all that finding true love garbage. Even among humans, aliens, vampires and seals, but this was pretty close to unbearable.



Highlights: Jacob Black, New Moon movie (the trailer looked pretty good--it seems they were able to do what Stephenie Meyer couldn't do)
Not so much: Bella, Edward, Stephenie Meyer's writing abilities

Feel free to hurl the tomatoes now!