...A review! I wrote this last year when a girl from year 10 reviewed Twilight in the school library magazine. Being of (sort of) sound mind and decent taste in literature, I was a little infuriated by it's glowing review of a book I find utterly atrocious. This was my reply. I just found it on my hard drive and thought I'd share. A real blog post soon, I promise!
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Twilight Book Review: A Response.
Firstly, I believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, if you want to believe that Twilight and it's satellites are astounding pieces of enrapturing literature then that's fine. However, then I in turn am entitled to my opinion, which is this.
Twilight is one of the worst books I've ever read.
I say 'one of' because I've read a lot of books, some of which have simply not been for me, some have been predictable and others have been aimed at a much younger demographic. Twilight, I am sad to say, is one of the select few that covers all three of those bases. Except it is the latter masqurading as something more sophisticated.
As I read through the review of it in my college magazine I was not surprised at the review written by a 16-year-old girl with delusions that real love is all sacrifice and stalking. Rather, I would've been more shocked if someone had chosen to review something worthwhile like The Gone-Away World or The Name of the Wind, then I would've been less apathetic.
She said that it was a tale of true love's struggle against impossible obsticles. It's not. It's another teen romance with housetrained 'vegetarian' vampires, where every character is impossibly attractive and if they're in any way normal looking they're shunned as geeks, or spotty or generally not worth talking to. This is something that bothers me, mainly because most people are normal looking, every teenager gets spots and, for four or so years of their life, looks... not unattractive but normal. It's normal to have faults. Crooked smiles don't count. The truly beautiful are the elite and confined to Hollywood, no one looks incredible when they wake up in the morning. Everyone has bad days. Even Megan Fox.
When reading Twilight, because I have, I nearly lost the will to live, but I did. I spent much of my time expecting something to happen. The first line alone suggests that something should happen, and yet nothing ever does, and when the time comes for the final battle, the taking on of the Boss, so to speak, Bella passes out and due to the first person narrative, we miss it. So I read 400-odd pages for nothing. It seems to me that Ms. Meyer got so caught up in the wish-fullfillment of vampire romance that she forgot that something exciting is supposed to happen in a book and so tacked on a plot three quarters of the way through.
Also, it's teeming with... not grammatical errors as such, but syntax errors, it's full of stentences that only just make sense. I'm a writer, I write a novel every November for National Novel Writing Month and I know that there is a rhythm to reading, you don't read every single word, and if something trips you up, especially at a crucial point (and those are few and far between in Twilight) having to read something again can really ruin the intended pace and tone of a scene.
To conclude, I found Twilight, whiny and boring with vaugely unsettling undertones. Which isn't to say there are no positive points about it, there are some good slices of description and what could potentially be some fullfilling, well-rounded characters. The problem I have, however, is that the former are fleeting and the latter are almost completely ignored.
If you have any sense or reason do not read this book, it's a waste of time and energy. Leave it for the delusional twelve-year-olds who believe they're going to be whisked away by a sexist creature of the night with anger management problems who's 'just doing it because he loves her.'
Katie over and out!
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