Yesterday I read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. It's the first book in a series of books named, coincidentally, The Twilight Saga. I first learned about the book via YouTube vloggers, fiveawesomegirls, who seemed to be fans -- so much so that they traveled to the middle of nowhere, where most of the book takes place. Then a week or so ago, one of the Culver-Palms Youth mentioned having just read the first book and also liking it a lot. It's a Young Adult book, but I happily read through all the Harry Potter books last summer, and the Twilight books have really good review ratings on Amazon.com, so I figured I'd give Twilight a try.
I have to say that I was disappointed.
I suppose it's not a bad book, but a mediocre one. When I actually browsed through the reviews and read what readers had to say, a pattern seemed to emerge. A number of the reviews indicated disappointment with the book for its shallow characters and dialogue, melodramatic plot, and rather inane lessons for adolescent girls. In this first category, this one's my favorite. A number of comments leapt to the author's defense, mentioning how much they loved the book, how well they could relate to the characters, how it was the best book of all time. On the whole, it seems like this first group of reviews is written by adults. The second group of reviews, by teenagers (who often mentioned the fact that they are teenagers and could totally relate).
There are about 1500 reviews right now, a lot of them which seemed to convey disappointment but the vast majority of which gave the book 5 stars. I'll give the book some credit for knowing its audience, and recognize that even I like to eat candy sometimes. I mean, for all of my complaining to Alex throughout, I did keep reading.
-- we loved our Kindle 1.
