I read the book over our WorldCon trip, and enjoyed it more than I’d really anticipated. My writing friend, Becca, has had her book compared to Twilight, so I was curious. I found it a fairly light read, but thought it did well what it aimed to do, which was share a sweet and fresh love story with its YA audience. The voice was engaging, the mc likeable, the vampire family interesting as invididuals. I don’t plan on reading the rest the series, but I’m glad I got to read Twilight.
I’m afraid my only gratitude on leaving the theater after the movie Twilight was that I’d only lost two hours, and that the movie was so bad it crossed over from dull into laughable. There were lots of little problems with the flick, such as the tangent story lines which only made sense if you’d read the book, the ridiculous ‘flying’ moments when you could almost hear the gears whirring, and the cuts from the mc’s life which left her much less likeable.
But the great strength of the book was the intense if a bit dangerous attraction between Bella and Edward. Likewise the great flop of the movie was the total lack of chemistry between the actors playing Bella and Edward. If there was one truth absolutely essential to the book it was the crackling energy of these two and the spiraling possibilities around them as their relationship developed. In the movie, you’d find more sexual tension in a pair of poseable dolls. It was sad, really, because if the movie had gotten that right, I might have forgiven it everything else.
