Characters:
Bella
Obviously, Bella is the main character in the story, the whole thing being told exclusively from her point of views. What did I think of her? Well, to be honest, I didn't like her very much. My two overwhelming character traits for her are the fact that she's pretty damn miserable and she falls over a lot. Later in the story she develops a pretty obsessive love for Edward. And that's it.
I'm sure she's described in the story. I know that several times her outfits warrant a good mention and that she has pale skin. Other than that, I don't know what she looks like. I'm not sure if I just missed those descriptions or if I'm building my entire mental image of her on pictures of the actress who plays her in the film.
Edward
He is one seriously weird guy. I mean, I'm fairly certain that being turned into a vampire when you're not even out of your teens is going to mess you up a bit, but he needs serious psychiatric help. Number one creepy thing is the fact that he crept into Bella's room to watch her sleep, unbeknownst to her. Watching someone sleep is creepy at the best of times, unless the person sleeping is an adorable newborn baby or a cute animal which is dreaming; otherwise, even for the nicest person, it crosses into serious weird territory.
His mood swings also did nothing to endear him to me. I was not at all impressed by the way that he swung from happy and loving one minute to snapping and irrationally angry the next. Often this seemed to be without warning. People like that scare me and so that was definitely not a point in his favour.
On the other hand, we definitely knew what he looked like; shiny, marble, cold skin; magical colour changing eyes (dependent on mood, of course); nice smelling breath. I'm slightly disturbed by how much about Edward's appearance I have retained. Clearly it was mentioned fairly frequently!
Other characters:
Oh, I wish we had seen more of Alice. She was the most interesting, likable character in the whole book. I want to know more about her background and I want to just see more of her in general. I'm also fairly certain that she has a thing for Bella, and personally I think I'd rather read about Bella/Alice and than Bella/Edward.
The other Cullens. Uh, I'm kind of 'meh' about them. Emmett and Jasper seemed to be fairly interchangeable. Rosalie's main feature is the fact that she doesn't like Bella. Esme seemed pretty okay and Carlisle had an interesting history but other than that I wasn't really interested in him. Well, aside from the fact that it's kind of weird how he wanted to 'collect' all these vampiric teenagers.
Bella's parents. I liked Charlie. I felt kind of sorry for him for being stuck with Bella, especially towards the end when she was being horrible to him. Renee is basically a teenager herself. I don't think she's all that worried about her daughter. I can't imagine a woman whose daughter is in hospital itching to get away to speak to her husband, especially after being separated from her daughter for months.
The Story:
Writing Style
I was not a fan of the writing style. Perhaps it's just because I've gotten used to reading more classics this year, or books by people who are so totally different to Stephenie Meyer's style. It reminded me of some of my early attempts at fanfiction; a good marker for people who are new to writing fanfiction, they refer to eyes as 'orbs'.
There were several times where I had to reread a sentence a good couple of times to figure out just what was being said in it. And a lot of the time there were things that Bella and Edward said to each other that I just didn't understand. I'm not sure if that was just not something I didn't get in the actual conversation, or if it was the way things were worded that meant I missed the point.
That's not to say that there weren't some nice turns of phrase, but they were surprises rather than the norm. I talked about The Book Thief in my book review this week; I first read that during a 'book tree' where we wrote in a copy of a book and shared it with other people. With The Book Thief I easily could've underlined half the lines in the book just because I loved them all so much. In Twilight I could've maybe underlined about half a page. It just didn't grab me.
Plot
Eh. It was okay.
I can't really say that much about it because I think I said most of it during the course of the reviews. It was interesting but not much of it took me by surprise. It seemed easy to figure out which way the story was going and then it went there; there wasn't really anything in the way of twists or turns. In fact, the chapter titles meant that it was pretty easy to figure out what was going to happen.
To start off with I was hoping that there would be a double meaning in the chapter titles. There wasn't. It's a shame because I was hoping that there would be another level of meaning to the story. There wasn't.
Final thoughts on Twilight:
It was a mindless fluff kind of book. The sort of thing I'd expect to maybe read if I was away on holiday and didn't want anything that would ask me to think too much. Of course, I did end up thinking because I just couldn't fathom what was going on, or why, or what the attraction towards Edward was, or why he was that interested in Bella, and a hundred and one other questions.
I don't think that Edward and Bella's relationship is the finest example of a love story ever known. Edward is weird and Bella is boring. I don't think they should be held up as a fine example of young love.
Next week I'll take a look at New Moon, the cover, the blurb and what I'm expecting from it.
I'm guessing, more of the same.
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