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?”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I have no plans to read any of the other books in this series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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?” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,57,58,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-im-reading","category-fantasy-what-im-reading","category-romance-what-im-reading","category-young-adult-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}