Sunday, January 1, 2012

Twilight.... LIke the Author, I am taking the lazy way out

Somebody made a statement to me when I informed them that my next review would be on this quadrology (not really a word.) The statement was something similar to "everybody who is going to read twilight has already read them." I hope that is not the kind of legacy that Stephanie Meyer has created. I think that Twilight will be around for many, many more years. That statement makes me a little sad. I learned that it is always a good idea to sandwich criticism with compliments. So lets begin.
For the purpose of laziness I will only be reviewing the first book in the series. This book introduces the main characters and begins to develop their personalities and give a bit of back story for some of them. It does a good job of laying down the "rules" of being a vampire, and creates an entire subculture where vampires and humans exist together, with humans having little to no knowledge of their existence. A love story develops between Bella and Edward, the two main characters, but Jacob, the pervert, does his very best to get Bella to love him, but only makes her mad. He also succeeds gloriously in making anybody with half a brain reading the book that he is, indeed, a big pervert and, pardon the language, a douchbag (I know it's supposed to be two words, but it sounds cooler when said as one word.)
So I was attempting to re-read Twilight and it struck me out of the blue that Stephanie Meyer may not be the really stupid, poorly edited, writer that I thought she was. She may actually be an extremely talented, genius, depending on how you look at it. I always, and still do, thought that her books were childish, poorly written excuses of American Literature. That is still true, but she did something, on accident if you ask me, that I have never really seen before. She wrote a book from the perspective of a 17 year old girl with no experience in writing or story-telling and made it look as though it really was a 17 year old girl with no story-telling experience and zero writing ability who was writing this story. Maybe I was not giving the author enough credit. Maybe she is a genius or maybe she just had the same writing and story-telling ability of a half depressed, manic, indecisive, naive, and all around hatable and likable 17 year old girl named Bella. I have my opinion, but will leave you to ponder what yours might be. So onto the book.
In all fairness it was written for teenage girls and what would they know about sentence structure, plot lines, dialogue, redundancy or character development. The characters never changed internally. They were the same characters in the beginning of the book that they were at the end, even though they had all undergone major life changes, well maybe not charlie. Charlie is my favorite character in the books by the way. He is pretty awesome, and mostly just because he is most like me and grown up, and not in the Edward kind of way, more of in the Carlisle kind of way. It is dismal love story with a few high points, but again it is more of a utopian love and less like a real life love. Then again, it was written by a teenage girl for teenage girls. I am referring to the actual writer, Bella, and not Stephanie Meyer.
If you think that I am being unfair to the author (the real and fake one), or to the series in general, I am. It was terrible in every possible way. If you have a few hours of your life to waste, then pick up this book. If you really want to become intellectually better, then pick up a different book, or maybe even a Sports Illustrated. At least that way the writing is accurate and high quality. You might also learn something. Also on what planet do Vampires SPARKLE. Tom Cruise never sparkled. GARBAGE.