A Book A Week - Week 3: Twilight

This week's book:
   Twilight   by Stephanie Meyer

Grade: D-

Wow, I did not like this book.  At.  All.  If I had been reading this for my own enjoyment I don't think I would have gotten past the first few chapters.  But  I stuck it out to the bitter end.  For you.  I tried to clear my mind of any preconceived notions before I started, I wanted to give the author a fair chance; the critics have been wrong before.  Given the general disdain for this book and the subsequent dismissal of its fans, I half-expected the story to have been scrawled in crayon.

Well... it wasn't 'scrawled'... not as such...  Near as I can figure this is the story of how cool it would be to have Superman as your boyfriend, if he were also a mind-reading vampire.  And had a Super-vampire family that was, like, so totally much more cool than your own lame family.  Stupid non-super humans.

The prose is not good.  There's no other way to put it.  Inexpertly accomplished at best, glaringly amateur at worst.  I got the feeling that the author wrote an outline in one draft and stuck to it, no matter what, and stuck to a certain word count every day, no matter what.  Like her main objective was to get it done, not to make it good.  Her writing is flat and lifeless, and reading it felt like taking my medicine.  The biggest flaw I found was a marked tendency to dot all the i's and cross all the t's - meaning the author takes us through all of Bella's days.  Each.  And.  Every.  Day.  In.  Pointless.  Detail.  She eats breakfast cereal a lot.  And turns down normal boys at school.  And obsesses page after agonizing page over pretty Edward, who she decides very easily must be a vampire.  There's no build of dramatic tension, no release, no foreshadowing, no twist.  A novel is supposed to take readers on a journey, a trip through foreign lands past astounding vistas.  This felt like a high school Chemistry film, 'Our Friend Boron.'  In black and white.  From 1956.

I did not like the main characters.  I might have been inclined to forgive the poor execution and plodding pace if the author had given me lively, vibrant characters.  Nope.  Bella is awful, Edward is creepy, and everybody else is a cardboard cut-out.  Characters should reflect part of ourselves - good or bad - but these two have all the depth of lovers intertwined on the cover of a paperback bodice-ripper.  Except characters in 'Twilight' don't have sex.

If I were the editor faced with this steaming pile of prose, I would have required a page one rewrite, complete with new outline.  There's about 100 pages of story in this 500-page monstrosity, the rest is getting from place to place and padding and teen-angsty longing for a beautiful vampire boy.  Oh, and there's the last 150 pages or so where other vampires are introduced and decide to kill Bella, which felt like the tacked-on addition it clearly was.

By far my biggest complaint is that given the massive commercial success of 'Twilight' and its sequels, now a generation of young women thinks that this miserable excuse for a book is what a novel is.  They think this is how you write a story.  More than a few of them will try their hand at writing, and they'll imitate this, and then they'll wonder why no one appreciates their efforts.  At least one of them will have the potential to be a great novelist, but she'll be put off by the experience and quit, and never produce the work she was supposed to.  Society will be robbed of a future literary treasure because of this book.
     Yeah... that's how much I didn't like it.  Lots.


Next week:
   Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die   by Willie Nelson
    I understand he's tried pot once or twice...