Confessions of a 31-Year-Old Male "Twilight Addict"

by Stephenie Meyer
-Twilight Series, Book 1-
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005)
Trade Paperback, 533 Pages, Young Adult Fiction

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it;
for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
- Genesis 2:17

My Review: Okay, this book ... this book is like crack: horrible, addictive, wonderful crack. Crack that was written with young teenage girls in mind.

Quite honestly, I'm embarrassed about posting here that I have even read this book. I'm embarrassed to admit that I even know who Bella, Edward, Jacob, Emmett, Alice, Jasper, and Charlie are and that I cared this much about them! Let me set the stage. I work at a charter school here in Utah and am an Assistant Teacher in the seventh and eighth grades. Last year, every girl in the middle school was carrying around this novel, as well as its sequel New Moon. (See, it's so bad, I know there is a sequel, and I'm excited about it!) This is so embarrassing.

Anyway, when we headed back to work, the prep week before school actually started, I was talking with the teacher I work with. At 34, she's three years old than I am and is an English Literature major as well. She started talking about these novels, and got to talking about how she picked it up finally (at the insistence of one of our students) and she starts talking about how she couldn't put these novels down. She finished the first in record time and then has to go out and pick up the second and finally the third (Eclipse, which just came out this summer). She has since read them four times and is addicted. For me, that cut it. I had to see what these books were all about. After all, as far as I knew, they were simply teenage romance novels with a gothic/supernatural twist. Surely they couldn't be that good. After all, these were mostly teenage girls obsessing about the characters and scrawling "I ♥ Edward" on their binders and book covers. So, I asked this teacher (she would be mortified to know I was writing this, even in the most oblique of terms) if I could borrow her copy of Twilight. After all, had I wished to wait on the Hold List at either of my local libraries, I would have been 97^th on one list and 101^st on the other. (As it is I am 66^th in line for the Twilight audiobook edition...)

This was Friday, October 5, 2007 and here it is Monday, October 8, 2007 and I'm writing my review. I could not put this damn book down. It is quite literally literary crack! The only reason it took me this long to finish is because I had two papers to write over the weekend, books for my classes I needed to stay on top of, a midterm to start prepping for and I didn't want to let anyone see me reading it so when I went to my class on Friday it stayed in my car under a jacket so no one in the Language Arts building parking lot would see it, and I couldn't take it with me to the Laundromat on Saturday because I was only a couple of blocks from campus and what if I were to run into someone I know!

So, after all of this preamble, what did I think? Well, I have a couple schools of thought when it comes to this novel. First, as I have so stated above, this book is literary crack. There's no two ways about it, whatever else its merits may be, Stephenie Meyer has created something that draws the reader in and makes them want to know more, and know more now. I ascribe this to one thing and one thing alone. It's not Meyer's writing skills, they are pretty basic in Twilight. It's not her plot (which is simplistic) or her ingenuity ... Edward Cullen and his family remind me too strongly of Anne Rice's vampires (Lestat in particular) to give Meyer too many Brownie points on that score. But, her characters are so well rendered that it saves the whole novel. You turn the pages in Twilight quite simply because you need to know what happens to Bella and Edward. Not because the plot is that good, but because the characters are. Meyer had tapped into some alchemic well of the writer's soul that allows her to draw up round and dynamic characters that live and breath on the page (well, maybe not in Edward's case, but you get the idea).

The illusion of "reality" is so strong that it makes you care about these characters in ways that you don't in other young adult literature. That said, I don't know about letting an early teenager - like some of the Sixth and Seventh graders that are reading it at the school - read this novel. While there is nothing particularly "risqué" about Twilight the climax of the novel is particularly horrific and bloody. Something I would expect in, say, Stephen King or Dean Koontz and not something that occupies the "Hot Titles" of the Young Adult section of my local library or bookstore. So, if you are of a mind to let your teenagers read this, I would say to preview it first (it shouldn't take the average adult too long to plow through it) and then decide.

But, be forewarned. Pick up this book, start at page one and you are starting down a road that you most likely will not be able to turn around on. I already know I am going to have to see this series to the end. That means Book Two: New Moon, Book Three: Eclipse, Book Four: Breaking Dawn which has just been announced, and the rewrite of Book One from Edward's point of view titled Midnight Sun (a chapter of which can be read on Meyer's website). Also, how pathetic is this, I'm actually somewhat thrilled at the prospect of there actually being a Twilight movie. I just hope they don't screw it up. (Great Googly Moogly, did I just say that out loud?!) Now I have to go to work tomorrow and ask this teacher to borrow her copy of New Moon; the teaser chapter at the end of Twilight just whet my appetite for more. ... *sigh* ... I need serious help.