Novelish

Having recently finished Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse, it seems like a good time to get around to reviewing the series from the beginning. I’ll start with something positive. It’s one of the more entertaining books I’ve read this year.

Now, the rest:

I’m ashamed that Twilight entertains me, because it’s
such unadulterated literary crap. (The Eragon of the teen romance, if you will. I’m sure that is all the description necessary to send many writers fleeing in horror.)

The book starts with the main character and narrator, Bella Swan, moving to Washington State to live with her father. She soon falls “unconditionally and irrevocably” in love with Edward Cullen.

User “romancenovel” on livejournal puts this well:

[I] found Bella falling in love with Edward to be completely unrealistic. Lust, probably. Some sort of hormonal state that approximates love, perhaps. But Twoo Wuv (TM)? Right away? At seventeen, never having experienced anything before, and with little knowledge of what true love might be? And ready to live with him eternally despite not knowing which side of the bed he prefers to sleep on, or whether or not he leaves his socks strewn around the living room? Come on. Very teenager-ish, very Romeo-and-Juliet, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of her ’smart’, ‘middle-aged’ character.

And Edward Cullen? Not to get caught up on quoting other people or anything, but:

[F]rankly, 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.

My largest problem with it was the writing style itself. The dialogue tagging’s awful. I flip through the book at random and I find:

• continued
• asked
• called
• murmured
• snickered
• encouraged
• croaked
• ordered

Do I find said? No, I do not. Said - which is all that’s really needed in most situations - is used very sparingly indeed. “Asked” appears far more than “said.” And good luck trying to find even one “said” without an adverb attached, because adverbs are used almost as freely as in the Harry Potter series, both in conjunction with dialogue tags (”He asked ominously,” “I added earnestly” - both real examples) and elsewhere.

Yet Dialogue is only one small piece of what I don’t like. The whole voice of the narrator is just unappealing to me, for any number of reasons that are less easy to pin down. Probably it’s a combination of things: the choice of words, the way sentences are constructed, the paragraphs.

The plot felt wrong. Disconnected. Coincidental. You start to believe it might lead up to an intriguing finale, but the cause of the action at the end doesn’t enter the book in any form, and isn’t so much as hinted at, until chapter seventeen. If an impromptu game of Vampire Baseball in the Rain hadn’t taken place - or if it had been on some other day - or even if Bella hadn’t gone to watch it - the trouble would all have been avoided and there wouldn’t have been much of a story.

In other words, it felt like there were two separate sources for conflict in the novel that don’t overlap very well: relations with Bella’s love interest Edward, and the eviler (less sexy) vampire of Chapter Seventeen.

Differing opinions

Plenty of people do disagree with almost everything I’ve said. The review on Two Motives, which I quoted above, generated some interesting comments:

if you do not like twilght there is something insanly wrong with you or the rest of the world who is head over heals for this book.

[Y]ou may have your view of the novel but not many will agree with maybe you should re-analyze your thought on it.

Alrich you bitch I think your a dick not Edward. Maybe you could have expressed your opions a little nicer but you brought this on yourself you just pissed alot of people off and i have news for I will whoop some ones ass for being a bitch and you really should think about being nicer. [...] So get over yourself and shut that hole in you face you call mouth.

(I’m inclined to think something is wrong with the rest of the world.)

However, more reputable sources also praised Twilight, some of them quite highly. I normally trust Publisher’s Weekly. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. Booklist gave it a starred review, too. So did the School Library Journal.

Related Novelish entries:

• New Moon
• Eclipse (coming soon)

More reviews:

• The Review Revolution (neutral)
• Vulpes Libris (positive)
• Two Motives (negative)
• Books Love Me (positive)
• Beside The Norm (negative)
• LJ user “romancenovel” (negative)
• LJ user “aoibhinn” (negative)