kippurbird | Eggs and book.

I blame

canadianevil for making me start this. =D

Our new book is called Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. It has the following summary:

Summary: Up–Headstrong, sun-loving, 17-year-old Bella declines her mom's
invitation to move to Florida, and instead reluctantly opts to move to her dad's cabin in
the dreary, rainy town of Forks, WA. She becomes intrigued with Edward Cullen, a distant,
stylish, and disarmingly handsome senior, who is also a vampire. When he reveals that his
specific clan hunts wildlife instead of humans, Bella deduces that she is safe from his
blood-sucking instincts and therefore free to fall hopelessly in love with him. The
feeling is mutual, and the resulting volatile romance smolders as they attempt to hide
Edward's identity from her family and the rest of the school. Meyer adds an eerie new
twist to the mismatched, star-crossed lovers theme: predator falls for prey, human falls
for vampire. This tension strips away any pretense readers may have about the everyday
teen romance novel, and kissing, touching, and talking take on an entirely new meaning
when one small mistake could be life-threatening. Bella and Edward's struggle to make
their relationship work becomes a struggle for survival, especially when vampires from an
outside clan infiltrate the Cullen territory and head straight for her. As a result, the
novel's danger-factor skyrockets as the excitement of secret love and hushed affection
morphs into a terrifying race to stay alive. Realistic, subtle, succinct, and easy to
follow, Twilight will have readers dying to sink their teeth into it.

Let us look at this. It starts so well. We have our protagonist going somewhere she admittedly doesn't want to go even though she has the option to go to Florida where she'd be much happier. This will allow her to angst about how horrible her life is at this new place where there's no sun and stuff.

Ten internet cookies say I'm right.

Never realized that falling in love with someone is an option. Also the prey-hunter romance is old.

There's a short preface that seems to actually take place later on in the book, as it talks about having been to Forks for several months now. It involves a first person narrator talking about being in a room about to die. The Narrator doesn't appear to be tied down in anyway and is in a long room waiting for the hunter to come and kill them.

"Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I
loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something."

I never really understood that particular sentiment. I think it would be more noble to try and fight for your life than just stand there waiting for someone to kill you.

Chapter one: "First Sight"

The story is in first person, and our narrator is called Bella. We begin in a car. Bella is wearing "my favorite shirt — sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing
it as a farewell gesture." This is problematic for me, merely because I don't understand why the shirt is a farewell gesture. I could understand if it was for good luck on the trip, but she doesn't explain how it is a farewell gesture.

She is going to Forks Washington as she says, "It was to Forks that I now exiled myself— an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks." This is our angst set up. She doesn't want to go and live with her father up in Forks. She despises Forks and she has no reason to go to Forks. Her mother is going to Florida and Bella can come too. Still, she's making herself go, for some unstated reason.

There's no description here, it all talking heads in space as we suddenly go from the car to the terminal with no transition. All of a sudden Bella is getting on the plane. Which is confusing for me.

She skims over the flight and what happens, not letting us feel her emotions on what is going on.

It's a four-hour flight from Phoenix to Seattle, another hour in a small
plane up to Port Angeles, and then an hour drive back down to Forks.
Flying doesn't bother me; the hour in the car with Charlie, though, I was
a little worried about.

We haven't seen her do anything yet, except mentally whine. We've been told a whole lot, but not seen anything. This is a good example here:

Charlie had really been fairly nice about the whole thing. He seemed
genuinely pleased that I was coming to live with him for the first time
with any degree of permanence. He'd already gotten me registered for high
school and was going to help me get a car.
But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone
would call verbose, and I didn't know what there was to say regardless. I
knew he was more than a little confused by my decision — like my mother
before me, I hadn't made a secret of my distaste for Forks.

A lot of this information could have been delivered in dialog as she and her father (Charlie) drove to Forks, also showing us the awkward tension between them. We do get conversation, it's about the car her dad got her. Instead of being happy shes getting a car and not having to be driven around in her father's police car, she's upset that she's gotten an old car.

An upset-ness that goes away as soon as she sees it. Where she automatically loves it. She goes in. She unpacks. We get sparse description of the house and room, and then she starts in on how "I would be the new girl from the big city, a curiosity, a freak."

To help with this angst we get an obligatory paragraph of description.

Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red
hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft
somehow, obviously not an athlete; I didn't have the necessary hand-eye
coordination to play sports without humiliating myself — and harming both
myself and anyone else who stood too close.

When I finished putting my clothes in the old pine dresser, I took my bag
of bathroom necessities and went to the communal bathroom to clean myself
up after the day of travel. I looked at my face in the mirror as I
brushed through my tangled, damp hair. Maybe it was the light, but
already I looked sallower, unhealthy. My skin could be pretty — it was
very clear, almost translucent-looking — but it all depended on color. I
had no color here.

First, how do you keep skin ivory if you're so fond of the sun. Second ANITA BLAKE FLASHBACK!! slender but soft... kindareminds me of curves in all the right places, or an attempt to say that she wasn't anorexic. I'm not certain. It's an odd turn of phrase.

She's also klutzy. One of the ways that Sue-Authors often uses to prove their Sue is not a Sue is by making her extremely klutzy. As a flaw. But the extreme klutziness is often as over blown as the graceful Sue.

Finally: translucent skin?! There was a JLA issue where Superman's skin became translucent. It wasn't at all pretty. You could see his muscles and things.

There's more telling, as she says that she cried to sleep, but we're not given any reasons for why she cries. We're just told she does. And we're told she has an awkward breakfast with her dad. Instead of showing it.

And off she goes to school. She gets her class list and her first class is English where she informs us that, "It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I'd already read everything. That was comforting… and boring." This irks me. There's more to these books/authors than just reading them. You can discover new and different things about them every time your read them. PlusI highly doubt that this teacher would go over the same exact material in the same exact way as her old teacher.

Class moves on, she meets people whose names she doesn't remember. And then at lunch she sees them. Bum bum buuuuuuum! There are five of them, three boys and two girls, sitting and not doing anything but staring at their uneaten food. All of them beautiful and

"I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all
devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to
see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or
painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide
who was the most beautiful — maybe the perfect blond girl, or the
bronze-haired boy.

Pretty vampires are pretty. I think it's a side effect of becoming a vampire, you instantly become inhumanly pretty.

There's a dialog dump about the five vampires ""That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his
wife." She said this under her breath."

We spend a FASCINATING amount of time describing the vampires. Which means they're important. You don't describe things in fascinating amount of detail if they aren't important. Bella and Edward exchange glances.

She manages to remember his name when she sees him in their biology class after lunch. Edward is not happy that he has the only open seat (coincidently).

I didn't look up as I set my book on the table and took my seat, but I
saw his posture change from the corner of my eye. He was leaning away
from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face
like he smelled something bad. Inconspicuously, I sniffed my hair. It
smelled like strawberries, the scent of my favorite shampoo. It seemed an
innocent enough odor. I let my hair fall over my right shoulder, making a
dark curtain between us, and tried to pay attention to the teacher.

He's trying to get away from the Sue before she entraps him into her spell. XD Actually, that's not the reason. We'll find out about it later.

But, once again, they are studying something that Bella already has learned. This time cellular anatomy. I'm getting the feeling that the reason why she's already studied all of this is because that way she'll have time to feel awkward and stare at Edward.

She does spend class staring at Edward, wondering why he's acting all stiff and un-relaxed around her. At one point she seems to think that it can't be her, maybe it's just him being weird.

When class ends and Edward bolts she declares him "Mean". No really. "He was so mean." He didn't do anything to her, except not talk to her and act a bit weird. It could be that he really feels uncomfortable sitting near people. But since he didn't say a word to her, unlike everyone else who seems to be fascinated with her, he must be mean. He also continues to get more description than anyone else.

As Bella leaves she runs into Mike who practically fawns over her. (Like everyone else) He mentions that Edward did, indeed, act weird. And so Bella starts to worry that it's her.

She returns to the school office to hand in the slip that she had to give all her teachers, and Edward is there. He is trying to trade his biology class to some other time. Which isn't working. When he sees her:

"Edward Cullen's back stiffened,
and he turned slowly to glare at me — his face was absurdly handsome —
with piercing, hate-filled eyes. For an instant, I felt a thrill of
genuine fear, raising the hair on my arms. The look only lasted a second,
but it chilled me more than the freezing wind."

Again, we get the description of how handsome he looks Every time we seem to see him, we learn once again, that he's pretty. Sorry, handsome.

Chapter one ends with her getting into her truck trying not to cry as she drove home. Why? Because out of all the people who like her and are friendly with her -everyone she meets - there's one person who doesn't and that's cruel and wrong.

There's an interesting thing here where Meyer's suffers from the opposite problem of Paloini. He over waxed descriptions where she has none (except where Edward is apparently concerned). She mostly has summaries as opposed to actions. The prose isn't horrible, just empty of information. She doesn't linger often on things. And some of the things that she summarizes could have been cut as we move into the action. Or turned into actual scenes. The departure from her mother at the gate would have been an excellent place to give a lot of information about Bella and her reasons for going. Which we still don't know and thus leading me to believe it's plot angst.

Mah Egglings