This review was last edited on 6 November 2008. A caveat: keep in mind that this was written سے طرف کی an adult man reading a young adult novel: my opinions will differ from many شائقین of the book just as my time in life and experience also differ.

In my mind, a review consists of three parts: a recommendation, a review of the plot, and a critique of the craft that went into the product. These each follow. If آپ have not read the book already and think آپ might, avoid the review and critique both, as they discuss the book in detail.

Recommendation: Definitely read Twilight if آپ are a preteen girl, یا آپ are interested in knowing what is enthralling all the preteen girls.

Synopsis: In Twilight, 17-year-old Isabella سوان, ہنس leaves her mom's ہوم in Phoenix, AZ to live with her father in gloomy Forks, WA. She feels alienated from everything until she encounters the Cullen family, a group of outcast vampires who've taken vows of abstinence (from killing people, not from sex), and falls in love with the lone singleton, Edward.

Detailed review: Pale clumsy Bella is desperately unhappy with her life. She doesn't feel like she belongs with her mom, so she decides to give her mom some space while her mom explores her relationship with her new husband. This involves Bella moving back in with her dad, Sheriff Swan, who lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, part of the Pacific Northwest rainforest. Bella is in no way close to her dad, but they are both somewhat antisocial and reclusive so they're not at each others' throats.

But going to school in Forks is awkward for Bella because she's a stranger transferring into school for her last سال of high school, sure to be a social pariah. Bella's never had a boyfriend and is comically clumsy, resulting in a very low self-image. Boys hit on her at school, but she doesn't know how to react and so doesn't. But she becomes entranced when she sees the five other pale kids at school: two couples and the odd man out, blond Edward.

Bella is assigned to be Edward's lab partner in biology/lab science, and Edward reacts to her with apparent revulsion. Flustered سے طرف کی this, Bella tries to distract herself from her fascination with the one guy who is rejecting her. Even though he shows nothing but distaste for her, Edward saves her life from getting crushed سے طرف کی an out of control van. To distract herself from thinking about him, Bella goes on a trip with some of the boys who have been mooning over her to the "beach" on the La Push Indian Reservation. There she re-acquaints herself with Jacob Black, a 15-year-old native of the rez who was a childhood friend. Bella plies him with سوالات about Edward. Jacob reveals that, according to tribal legend, Edward and his family are all supposed to be vampires who made a pact with the tribe to stay off their lands decades earlier.

Bella is intrigued even more, while still agonizing about Edward's aloof manner. Then Edward warms to her and they begin a romance. Edward reveals that he has super speed, super strength and can read minds, in addition to being irresistible to women. He takes her ہوم to meet his family and explains that their father, Dr. Cullen, swore to never take a man's life again. Since then, they've all been subsisting off of animal blood. Most of the family accepts her warmly, relieved that Edward has finally found a love interest. They all go on a family outing to play super-powered baseball when they are accosted سے طرف کی a traveling group of regular vampires.

One of these interlopers starts to hunt Bella and the family mobilizes to protect her, whisking her off to Arizona to escape. But the bad vampire follows her there, taunts her, beats her, and is about to tear her into little pieces when Edward saves her again. She recuperates in the hospital and then Edward takes her to the prom, where they declare their undying devotion to each other once again.

Critique: آپ could have pitched this book to a publisher as "Romeo and Juliet...with vampires!" In "Romeo and Juliet", Juliet is a young girl who experiences love for the first time, but unfortunately it is felt for a person who is taboo for her to love. In my recommendation for Twilight, I mentioned preteen girls. This book is solidly aimed at that demographic; everything about the book screams it, as if the مصنف had set down with the calculated intent to write a novel intentionally for preteen girls. From a book marketing perspective, this makes sense as a target demographic: not only do girls tend to read مزید than boys, but prepubescent girls have the most inclination and time to read before they hit puberty and start to get really interested in dating, before they start to work and before they start to drive, all activities that cut down on time for reading.

The protagonist of the story, Bella, is کہا to be 17, but in every other respect she's a 12-year-old. She's never been in love یا even dated. She's awkward, clumsy and uncomfortable in her own skin, the way many preteen girls are as the hormones begin making their bodies change at around ten, when they suddenly find themselves taller than all the boys, with arms and legs that are gangly before the rest of the body catches up. Similarly, when she does find herself attracted to Edward, she obsesses about his every action in minute, painful detail, but the subject of sex never really comes up (they do obliquely talk about it late in the book), which is uncharacteristic of pretty much any teen ever. Instead of wanting to jump his bones, she idolizes him in an abstract, romantic fashion very typical of a preteen's first crush. So we have a target demographic and a character with which that target audience can identify. How about the rest of it?

The craft of the book's writing isn't all that accomplished. The language is fairly simple, about the 6th grade reading level (which, it must be said, is typical of most best-sellers, and makes sense دیا that most people stop یا greatly cut back their recreational reading at about age 13) and most of the book focuses on Bella's thoughts and feelings, which are very repetitive. The character has a very low self-image, which is appropriate for a preteen child of a divorced family, but it gets a bit wearing to read over and over again how she doesn't trust یا believe Edward's constant affirmations of love and devotion.

For a genre book about vampires, it's amazing how little actual plot there is to the book. "Alienated girl meets nice vampire, falls in love, he saves her from another vampire." Essentially, that's it, even though the book is hundreds of pages long. Sure, there are a bunch of incidental characters, but they're mostly just sketches and not developed well. Jacob's dad, Billy, is intriguing, but we hardly see him at all (though I get the feeling that he will be fleshed out in a later book). Bella's dad is a sheriff for no other reason than that he has a reason to know all of the kids at her school and their families: his work doesn't play out in the story at all. The inciting incident of the story - Bella moving to Forks - is never adequately explained, instead glossed over, and the reason provided for her earth-shattering life change never feels very real. The book contains a lot of atmosphere (of the preteen angst variety) and not a lot of substance. It's going to be very interesting how they work the book into a feature-length film, as so little actually happens outside of Bella's internal monologue. Will they do a voice-over, یا just cut all the emotional analysis of Edward's actions?

Edward professes undying, eternal love to Bella again and again, but when he finally explains what the attraction is, the reason is that he likes her smell (actually he likens it to narcotics) and he can't read her mind (so she's mysterious - apparently he's forgotten how body language and facial expressions work to tell what people are thinking). That's it: he's in love with her forever because he's addicted to her smell and he can't hear what she thinks.

Jacob reveals the deepest secrets of his tribe to an outsider for no apparent reason, which I find hard to believe, even if he (along with every other teenaged boy in the book) is smitten with Bella. But he needed to put the idea of "vampire" in her head for the plot to progress, so he did.

In many ways reading Twilight reminded me of reading Piers Anthony's novels یا the "Dragonlance" series. They're not thematically similar سے طرف کی any means, but those are کتابیں that I enjoyed tremendously when I was twelve. I fully expect that many readers who thoroughly enjoy Twilight now will, as they continue to read and mature in their tastes, eventually find the book difficult to re-read in the future, because it's too simple and the writing's not that good. That's been my experience with the "Dragonlance" and Piers Anthony books: they're really appealing for the target audience, but the further I get from that target audience, the harder it is to read them without wincing.

Because I'm who I am, and not in the target demographic, I can't recommend this book to anyone other than the girls for whom it was written. For them it will be enthralling and deeply moving, but for the rest of us, it's مزید likely to read as a rather dull and puerile exploration of fantasy from the point of view of an insecure girl. But of course everyone is different. Let me know what آپ think of the book in the comments.