When her mother remarries, a teenaged girl moves to a small town to live with her father. There she meets and falls in love with a member of a very reclusive family, in spite of his wildly swinging moods and his very determined rejection of her early advances.
By chance she meets the son of an old family friend who tells her that the family are, in fact, a nest of vampires. At first reluctant to believe the claim she soon comes to believe in its truth. When she confronts the object of her desire with the allegation he confirms its veracity. She is too enamoured of him to let a little thing like vampirism put her off and he is enraptured by her acceptance of him. The two begin a relationship that is dangerous not only to both of them but also to all of those around them.
When she is attacked by a rival vampire and left for dead, he has the opportunity to turn her into one of his kind but instead saves her life. His act cements their relationship and the book ends with them attending prom together.
The first book in a quartet, much of Twilight is spent establishing the world and the characters in it to varying degrees of success.
The book offers a new variation of the vampire myth without straying too far from the traditional picture, providing the reader with a novel and believable reality.
Aimed at the young adult audience, the language and plot structure were straightforward and easily accessible. However, even when taking into consideration the intended audience, I found this book to be too superficial. The characters I thought were two dimensional at best and the heroine was waaay too angsty even for a teenaged girl. A large portion of the story is spent listening to her moan on and on about how much she likes the one boy in town who doesn’t seem to have fallen for her the minute she arrived. And very little of interest actually happens for about the first three quarters of the book.
The hero’s vampirism is the least scary thing about him. Though he looks like an adolescent he is over one hundred years old, making his obsession with a sixteen year old girl disturbing to say the least. He breaks into her house to watch her sleep, ignores her wishes, refuses to answer her questions and his violent mood swings are definitive of mental abuse. If he was hanging about my daughter I’d stake his sorry arse.
The author had a fantastic opportunity to write about the problems of a teen fitting in to a small town where everyone had already established themselves a place, of establishing new boundaries in a father/daughter relationship that had been casual and now was not, or even to explore the delicate nature of female friendship and rivalry. Sadly, she passed up that opportunity and the story is much poorer for it.
Having heard many, many positive reviews of Twilight I expected much more than I got when I finally read the book. I suppose there was no way for the story to live up to its reputation and it was inevitable I would be disappointed. Perhaps if my expectations had been lower I would have enjoyed it more.
Objectively, it’s not a bad book. I simply didn’t find it to be as good as I was lead to believe. I’m assured the second instalment in the series is better and I will probably read it eventually but I’ll be going in with very different, and much lower, expectations.-Lynn
For Alex's review of Twilight click here
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