Twilight (and Friends) by Stephenie Meyer

By "friends" I mean the rest of the series. I read them last year and it took me about 2 weeks to read all 4.

Ehh...they weren't really my type of book, but I found them to be a good enough read. It fits well in the teen romance genre (which I have enough of a bone to pick with)--girl meets boy, girl falls in love with boy, girl can't be with boy. It was pretty predictable over all.

However, the cult that came from it scares me. The part where Edward leaves Bella to save her life, I fear leaves girls with a misguided sense of male/female relations. Girls these days already have enough issues about being single that giving them hope that when a guy dumps them it is for an altruistic reason is detremental to society. Maybe if Bella and Edward were 30 and sensible the message would be better, but as an impressionable 15 year old (the age group this book is aimed towards) these books don't send a positive message. I've decided that they deserve a PG-25 rating (mental age of course) and I RARELY rate books and movies.

As for the movie (Twilight), I must be crazy because when it came to the way Edward was portrayed, I thought they did it fine. When I read the book, I felt that Edward was very unsure of himself and timid--just as he was in the movie. He leaving in book 2 and his actions in the final 2 books BOTH show that he wasn't comfortable with his situation and would rather crawl into a hole and die. I'm not sure why so many folks I talked to thought that Edward had been ruined--I thought Robert Pattinson's portrayal was dead on. Maybe this is a indicator that girls were viewing Edward as the "Knight in Shining Armor" willing to face down anything for the woman he loves and is afraid of nothing. The first might be true, but the latter, definitely NOT.

Anyway, this is my opinion on this book. I'll probably be putting my copies up for sale in the coming months (they're at home right now while I'm at school). It's not something that I'll be reading again any time soon. But go ahead and read it for yourself--like I said, it wasn't my type of book to begin with--it would already have been a one time read before I started.