There is no need to review this book for women, not that I could probably do that justice any way. It is already a cult classic among females from the teenage years on up, so there is nothing I could really say to change that.
I would, however, like to review this book for men.
After all, what man wouldn’t like a book about Vampires, right?
This book is so utterly devoid of anything that a man would find interesting that it might actually be impossible to write something more polarizing between the two genders than what Stephanie Meyer has managed to create.
She does a decent job of making a man think that it might finally become interesting at some point. She starts out with vampires. She introduces a legend of werewolves who are not friendly at all towards vampires. She displays brief flashes of vampiric powers (modified quite extensively to fit into a love story). She introduces a powerful and evil vampire as the nemesis. She builds up to a climax where the good vampire is going to have to defeat the evil vampire to rescue the damsel in distress.
Well, it does happen, but we don’t actually get the action shown to us in the book because the main character, through whose eyes we are witnessing the action in the book, is actually unconscious for the final battle.
She wakes up and hears that it has happened. And that’s when we find out that we are going to get absolutely NO action in this book.
Is there any mystery or intrigue?
Not really. It’s pretty easy to guess what is going to happen, except for the part that there isn’t actually a climax that is written down in the book. I didn’t see that coming.
What does it have then?
Teenagers feeling out a relationship with a lot of dialog, most of it very similar to what we hear from our own teenage daughters. This isn’t Harry Potter. It would be more akin to High School Musical with quasi-vampires and no songs. Or maybe the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with quasi-vampires.
What self-respecting man would want to read a book about teenage conversations and relationships and no actually interesting plot points or action?
None, I would guess.
It has to be, doesn’t it? They’ve added in the action that had been so callously removed by the author, but I have to think that we’ve seen all of the action in the trailers. What’s left is most likely all of the silliness of high school adolescents that we would probably much rather avoid anyway.
Author’s Note: Thanks to all of those who noticed the typo. It has been fixed. It is certainly refreshing that some readers today can still spot a typo when they see it.