by Ellen Donahue and Lane Bennett

WESTBOROUGH – Twilight – mania has struck the nation. Roughly 17 million copies have sold so far, and the recent movie has raked in an estimated $35 million during its premier weekend. But does the book really deserve all of the hype that has accumulated around it?

The romance/fantasy novel Twilight by Stephanie Myer follows the life of Bella Swan and her quest to become a vampire so that she can live with her boyfriend forever. Just from that sentence the reader should be able to tell that something is wrong with this book. The main character’s name literally means “beautiful swan”, which is as good a hint as any that she is an extremely clichéd character. The author means to depict Bella as an average, but selfless and sweet, teen; however, in reality she’s far from it. Bella Swan is self absorbed, anti-social and incredibly shallow. She spends the first fifty pages complaining that nobody in her new school will like her, and then spends the rest of the book complaining that they do. Bella instantly thinks Jessica, the first person to attempt to be friends with her, is only trying to get close to her to be popular despite the fact that she has no reason for thinking so highly of herself. When Bella meets perfectly nice boys like Eric or Mike she writes them off as being “an overly helpful chess-type” or “like a puppy” and thus not worth her time because they have a few physical flaws.

However, when Bella sets eyes on the oh-so-gorgeous Edward Cullen she instantly falls for him. She even becomes flattered when he tells her that he sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep. Bella spends pages talking about how she’s already read many books by Shakespeare and the Brontes’, however, when she meets and gets a good look at the Cullen clan the only way she can describe them is “the kind you see on the cover of Sports Illustrated” and “like a super-model”.

Bella’s love interest Edward is not much better. There is not much to really critique him on, though, since he’s completely void of any personality. Edward listens to old music, drives his car fast, and is a vampire. That’s all we ever really learn about him. Oh yes, and we also get to experience Bella eliminating pages and pages of massacred trees in the process of describing how beautiful Edward is. It’s almost as if Edward’s a walking Hallmark card seeing as how he’s constantly sprouting completely clichéd lines such as “You are my life now” and “So the lion fell in love with the lamb.” Later in the series he becomes right out abusive. He consistently orders Bella around, demanding that she do what he says and she does his bidding without question or complaint. Edward goes so far as to remove the car engine from Bella’s truck to prevent her from seeing her only friend that she cares about, Jacob Black. Bella automatically forgives him saying, “Oh, he’s just doing it because he loves me. He’s just protecting me. I made him do it.” This is ideal to what a woman in an abusive relationship would say. In Twilight, this concept is romanticized and now teen girls everywhere think that Edward is the perfect role model for a boyfriend.

Within the entire 498 pages of fluff, about three important events occur. Bella and Edward meet, Bella and Edward fall in love. And then there’s almost some conflict with another “bad vampire”.

Bella and Edward fall in love instantly. There’s no suspense, no conflict, no drama, no build up. It all just happens. Even when Edward tells Bella that he’s a vampire she doesn’t have one moment where she questions the relationship. We can’t blame her for not being surprised, though. The revelation that the Cullens are vampires is supposed to be shocking and intriguing to the reader; however, they’re secret is given away right on the back jacket of the book. This makes the book even more unreadable because you already know what’s going to happen. But unlike any sane or sensible person, Bella decides that she would like to become a vampire as well. Not because she’s intrigued by the powers of vampires, or vampirism in general, but rather because she wants to be able to stay home living off Edward’s money and having his children forever. Which is completely illogical when you think about it, since vampires really only have to suck the blood of a human in order to reproduce.

From page 376-451 there is almost a plot. The “bad vampires” (you know, the vampires who actually feed off of human blood. We know, it’s shocking, how could they?) show up and decide that Bella is just so amazing that they simply must feed from her. This naturally upsets Edward and his family, but the problem is quickly ridden of and Bella and Edward can go back to staring at each other.

The writing itself is mediocre. Lack of plot aside, there’s several grammatical and spelling errors in the actual book. Stephanie Myer brags about the fact that she did no research for the book, and that clearly shows. Out of the thousands of variations of vampire folklore, hers match none of them. She says “I started reading an Anne Rice book once, but I had to stop because it was too scary.” If the author is scared of the creature that she is writing about, our advice would be to write about something else. Our advice would also be to not write about vampires that can live off of animal blood with no problems at all and that can step out into the daylight. Being fans of the vampire genre, we nearly wanted to throw the book at the wall when we read that the “vampires” literally sparkle in the sunlight. Imagine a supermodel walking down the street doused in body glitter on a sunny day. That’s pretty much what Myer’s vampires are.

What we have to wonder is why books like Harry Potter with actual plot and character development are getting banned, when we think that we should be banning books that teach young girls that abusive and shallow relationships are ideal, but only if the abuser is hot.