Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I managed to read the first couple hundred pages, but after that it was so dull, trite and clichéd that I just skimmed along, picking up the important plot points along the way. All one of them. This is quite literally a romance novel, but written with teenagers in mind. It has all the prerequisites of your run-of-the-mill romance (note that I don't say "good" or even "mediocre"). Let's check them off: 1) Impossibly beautiful heroine who has no idea she's beautiful. 2) Mysterious two-dimensional hero with a dark secret. 3) Frequent urple prose descriptions of hair and eye colors. 4) The doormat of a heroine needs rescuing every few pages. 5) The Neanderthal of a hero runs roughshod over any opinions and desires the heroine has of her own, unless, of course, they coincide with his. 6) They suddenly fall in love. No build up, no rationalization, no sense, just a statement of illogical fact. 7) The hero's Deep Dark Secret is revealed and much angsting on his part ensues. 8) Out of nowhere the heroine's life is threatened and she makes an incredibly stupid decision that nearly kills her. 9) Rescue at the last minute and declarations of twu lurv all around. The only thing this novel doesn't have is horribly urple sex, and that's what gives it the teenage-appropriate feel. Certainly it's not the characters themselves. Edward, with his too-adult speech, at least has the excuse of being over a hundred years old. What's Bella's excuse? No seventeen-year-old I've ever met speaks like that. She sounds like a thirty-year-old masquerading as a high-school student. It really feels like the author just used her own words and made no effort at capturing what a real teenager would sound like. No, Bella doesn't just sound mature for her age, she sounds utterly unbelievable. And as others have already commented, what was up with her clumsiness? Unless she has some sort of medical disorder, the only reason for it seems to be to set up scenarios for her to be rescued. No one is ever that "conveniently" clumsy in the real world, not unless it's an act to get attention. Bella's character itself gets more and more annoying as the book goes on. To the point where you want to slap her and yell at her to stop making the female half of the species look bad. I've seen jellyfish with more spine than she exhibits through most of the book. She lets Edward dictate to her and push her around and never does more than sulk and glare. She never makes any real attempt at enforcing her own opinions/desires. The one time she actually shows some initiative, it's to do something so deeply stupid that you wish the two-dimensional bad guy had just killed her and taken her out of the breeding pool. And good god, has this woman no common sense? I can give no credence to her claim of having grown up in a big city, not when she goes wandering brainlessly on her own down empty streets in an unfamiliar city. No woman who grows up in even a small city would do such a thing. We know better. Bella acts more like she grew up in the suburbs or the country, where they're still under the delusion that crime can't touch them there. She'd be far more believable as a character if that was the background she'd been given. But coming from Phoenix? I don't think so. It just makes her look like, "All new: Victim Barbie! Push a button and she screams for her man to rescue her!" As for this new sort of vampire the author came up with, I have to give her credit for having some interesting ideas (and some really bad ones: glittery vampires? Is this like some new, Halloween version of My Little Pony?). "Vegetarian" vampires (ones who only feed from animals); cute bit of irony there. Some of them possessing different powers, how hard they are to kill, the fact that they don't sleep at all. That's actually interesting. But nothing much is really done with it, either. The focus inevitably shifts back to Edward and his angst and Bella and her increasingly mindless devotion. There's a short paragraph in the book itself that, I think does the best job of summing up the many flaws of this novel: "Oh well. He *is* unbelievably gorgeous." Jessica shrugged as if this excused any flaws. Which, in her book, it probably did. And I think that's what the author is hoping for here. That her audience will be so blinded by the pretty people and shiny romance that any flaws will be overlooked. And judging from the gushing reviews I'm seeing, it looks like it was a good gamble.