I’ll admit it — I wasn’t in a big hurry to pick up this novel despite all the hype. I’m not a huge fan of vampires, although I recently enjoyed Jim Butcher’s novels and his depiction of vampires. So when my book club decided to make this its October pick, I thought, “What the heck?”
At first, I found it relatively engaging. The writing style is competent and the story makes you feel like you’re in high school again.
But the book soon had me questioning what the hype is all about. I have to assume someone paid the right people a lot of money, because the story is uninteresting, the characters unlikable, and the romance was disgusting. Much of the middle of the book is given over to a dialog-based info dump in which the main character, Bella, asks her new boyfriend a hundred questions and he gives her answers straight from the author’s notes.
Bella herself, a girl who is supposed to be smart, is unbelievably stupid at times. She has no sense of mortality, which is possibly realistic for a teenager, but annoying as heck to read.
And then there’s the romance. Between a young girl and a monster who is attracted to her because he wants to eat her. I enjoy romance in my stories, and I even have a secret soft spot for men with a dark side, but I’ve always liked my men with a pulse. The repeated references to how cold Edward was just made me feel the chill and his almost psychotic display of how easily he could kill her made my skin crawl.
I have no plans to read any of the other books in this series.