Twilight

By Stephenie Meyer

I heard about this book from either Orson Scott Card or Bruce Webster and thought about it for my sixteen year-old daughter, Emily. She likes to read, but most of the stuff written for the mid-teen demographic is sex and drug-laden trash (really, try browsing a bookstore’s teen or young adult section for girls). Luckily, she hates that kind of stuff. This one seemed to be bereft of sex or drugs, which is pretty predictable being written by a Mormon mom. Emily was a little wary about a book recommended by her dad, but after a friend of hers gave it high praise, she decided to give it a shot. She immediately fell in love with it and devoured it. She quickly read the remaining two novels in the series and demanded that I pre-order the last book in the series, Breaking Dawn.

I wanted to see what made the book so engrossing, so I borrowed it from Emily. It wasn’t a hard read, but it was hard to keep my hands on it. Emily kept taking it back because she was re-reading the series. She re-read it at least three times. So I’d turn to my nightstand, find it gone and had to retrieve it from her room. If she was there, I usually couldn’t get it because she was reading it! So it took a while to get through, just because I couldn’t have it beside my bed every night.

But enough history. I wanted to see what Emily was reading, so I started reading it. It started out a little slow for my tastes and I could see it was squarely aimed at the teen/young adult demographic. It’s about a young adult teen girl, Bella.

I found the first two-thirds of this book to be rather dull, to be honest. And Meyer destroys one of the cardinal rules of writing: keep dialog tags simple. That is, write

“Please pass me the sugar,” he said.

Not

“Please pass me the sugar,” he whispered with a wry smile twitching on his lips.

Simple dialog tags become invisible to the reader and are the there only to remind the reader who’s doing the talking. Elaborate ones detract from the main point of the sentence: the dialog. They’re distracting. Meyer uses them liberally.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by stating the book is about vampires. Or rather, the main character, a human, finds herself attracted to one. Meyer successfully manages to create a vampire mythology that works for her story. And it doesn’t really uncomfortably contradict popular culture myths surrounding vampires. It just clarifies them for her own purposes. Bella, the protagonist, finds herself attracted to a beautiful boy who has some odd secrets with siblings that are also incredibly gorgeous. Unraveling the secrets and trying to develop a relationship under what seems impossible circumstances is what the story is about.

Now, the reason I found the first 66 percent boring is probably because I’m not a sixteen year-old girl. I guess they enjoy being morose and ruminating about how awful their lives are. They love to think of themselves as self-sacrificing and unappreciated. And therefore, I guess, they like reading about similar souls. They also want to fall in love with an Adonis. I don’t, so I wasn’t enthralled at first.

But the action picks up after the first 400 pages or so. I can’t say what happens, but it’s good. After that, I rushed through to get to the end. I guess it was good I had a lot of spare time to read just then. Is it worth the first 66 percent of sleeping material? I don’t know. If you’re a teen girl, I guess so. If you’re a middle-aged man, probably not.

But I have to give Meyer praise for not stooping to include any sex, drugs or profanity. She manages to establish a love relationship between the main characters without having them jump in the sack or share a joint together. This kind of stuff is probably out of Meyer’s experience anyway, but it’s good to see that she kept the characters decent and wholesome.

What I find most surprising is that this author, Stephanie Meyer, writes her first novel and scores a big hit. A Big Hit. All teen girls that I know (which isn’t many) love it. She made millions off her first few books and even scored a movie deal. She’s already a millionaire, off a book she wrote mainly for her own entertainment. However, more established writers, such as Orson Scott Card, have scores of books to their credit, some hits, some middling, are struggling to make a living, though they have thousands of fans and enormous literary clout.

Will I read the rest of the books? Probably not. I guess it depends on how many Robert B. Parker, John Grisham and Card novels I can get my hands on. But whether I do or not, Meyer has proven that it doesn't take sex, drugs or profanity to create a successful story.

External links

• Meyer's page on Twilight.
• Twilight on Wikipedia