A Review By Rebecca

This is a book popular with many teenage girls these days, and indeed many adult women. It has spawned two films already, and a third is already in production. There are thousands upon thousands of fans swooning over the male lead.

It’s a story about vampires, and I quite like vampires. It’s got romance in, and I haven’t got a problem with that. There are werewolves, too, which double the supernatural creatures, and I like pretty much all supernatural beings. The vampires and werewolves hate each other. That’s good; it promises plenty of action and hopefully some elements of horror. All in all, I thought, when Twilight was first described to me, this can’t be a bad book.

They forgot to mention the fact that the romance is more important to the plot than the vampires themselves.

And the sparkles.

Here’s a quick summary: Bella, hopelessly whiny, whose description is uncannily similar to that of the author, moves to new town that she hates. She meets a vampire, Edward, who seems to hate her at first but it actually having trouble with his uncontrollable thirst for her blood, because she smells really good. He falls in love with her, and she falls in love with him. But because he’s a vampire, he frets and worries that he’s going to eat her, and says they shouldn’t be together, even though he’s a supposedly ‘good’ or ‘vegetarian’ vampire. Except then he watches her sleep, decides he loves her too much, and they get together. The vampires are revealed to sparkle in the sunlight rather than burn. Then they play vampire baseball and some other vampires show up: one of them tries to kill Bella, she tries to heroically sacrifice herself to save her parents, Edward saves her, and the rest is mush.

There are so many things wrong with this book I don’t know where to start. The sparkling vampires, perhaps. Not only do they sparkle, but they are all incredibly beautiful, and their eyes change colours, and yet they manage to attend high school without anyone being suspicious of them at all. Apparently this is because they keep to themselves, but Bella notices all of this (except the sparkles, as the town she moves to is always cloudy or raining) almost immediately.

More importantly, they sparkle. Never before have vampires sparkled “like thousands of diamonds were embedded in [their skin]”, and I hope that they never will again. Somehow, this grates on me more than the instant romance; although perhaps not as much as the reason they fall in love (Bella’s reasons are actually rather unclear; it might just be because Edward is very pretty. It seems that Edward falls for Bella because she smells tasty, though I may be mistaken; there’s always the possibility that he falls in love with her because she’s really just a representation of the author, Stephenie Meyer. (According to Microsoft Word, she spells her name incorrectly)

This, I think, is also the reason why so many teenage girls like these books: because it is very easy for anyone to, if not sympathise with Bella, then at least to imagine themselves as her. As such, I would like to suggest that, instead of two hands holding an apple (which look suspiciously like something else if you cover the top and bottom thirds of the image), the front cover of this book should instead be emblazoned with a large disclaimer, warning those who read this book that ‘VAMPIRES WILL NOT FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU’.

Something like this?

As a final note, I would like to briefly mention that this is the story of a romance between a seventeen-year-old and a seven hundred-year-old. Which in my opinion is more than a little bit creepy.