Bella may be the most annoying heroine I have ever encountered. The first few hundred pages are her obsessing about whether Edward will be in the cafeteria, will he look at her, will he smile at her? When it isn't about Edward we're hearing about how uncoordinated Bella is, Gym is completely beyond her, and normal activities like walking and getting out of the car require intense concentration, often resulting in falls and scrapes.
Granted, I'm not an adolescent girl (ie. the target audience), who can probably empathise strongly with the "gorgeous guy in school doesn't notice me" situation, but being inside Bella's boring, insipid head is tedious.
So what does Edward see in her? Bella herself wonders this on many occasions. Would a 100+ year-old vampire with a fairly ridiculous array of superpowers really be interested in a whiny, uncoordinated 17 year-old? Sure, maybe her blood smells good, but a few minutes of talking to her should have cured him of any attraction (conveniently he can't read her thoughts, or he would have been turned off instantly).
The characters quickly declare their undying love, so the story can move on, and things actually get interesting 300+ pages in when other vampires arrive on the scene. Edward's control of his vampire urges seems to be a thinly veiled metaphor for a very conservative Christian 'no sex before marriage' vibe running through the book.
One final thing I found funny, at one point Bella uses cold medicine to drug herself to sleep. Meyer was obviously worried about giving teenagers this idea so she qualified it as below, but I think she could have left it out and avoided this weird 'say no to drugs' passage:
...so I did something I'd never done before. I deliberately took unnecessary cold medicine - the kind that knocked me out for a good eight hours. I normally wouldn't condone that kind of behavior in myself, but...
Maybe the next books in the series are better?
2.5 stars
Update: Saw the movie, and thought it was better than the book, which pretty much never happens. Slightly clumsy cameo for Stephenie Meyer was funny.
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