The initial success of the Twilight series passed me by, possibly because I’m not a teenage girl. Fortunately, my sister (also not a teenage girl) pushed the books into my arms with the words “Read them!!” and, despite my initial reluctance, I did. Some ten pages into Twilight I was completely hooked, so vivid and enthralling is Stephenie Meyer’s world. Everything about it—from her plotting to her characterization to her prose style—draws the reader in. My complaints are few and mostly centered around the issue of whether Bella should have become a vampire.

Let me start with the over-arching plot. Quite often multi-book series have an annoying tendency to have drawn-out storylines that last forever with no resolution of anything until the final volume. Meyer doesn’t make that mistake: each book is complete in itself. Possibly my favorite of the books is actually the third in the series, Eclipse, because of the werewolves and vampires coming together to save Bella. My least favorite is Breaking Dawn, which suffers from Superbaby-itis, and, frankly, Bella’s new baby being soul-mates with the teenage Jacob (while handled well by Meyer) still feels icky--really icky--to me.

Meyer is also extremely good at building questions into the plots that leave a reader craving the answer like a vampire craves blood. Will Bella and Edward get together? Will Bella and Edward stay together? Will Bella choose Jacob and not Edward? Will Bella actually go through with becoming a vampire? Will the werewolf pack go to war with the Cullens?

Admittedly, I don’t find anything particularly original in the series’ concepts. The idea of good vampires has already been done, most notably in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Forever Knight. The love story quite literally at the heart of the books is also the age-old tale of boy meets girl, or girl meets vampire (also done on Buffy). It’s easy to see the influences of Austen, Brontë and Shakespeare in Meyer’s writing, but while she may use well-worn tropes, she writes them with skill and in a way that makes them as fresh and sparkly as her vampires’ skin.

Some of that is no doubt because of her ability to paint her scenes so well with words; everything is described – sight, sound, smell, taste and feeling. It’s a fantastic skill and new writers would do well to study Meyer’s technique. But more than that, Meyer has a wonderfully accessible style that is easy to read, which is partly down to her characterization. I could wax lyrical about the supporting players (Alice in particular), about how hot Jacob is, how intriguing Edward is—how the characteristics of both play off their natures of werewolf and vampire respectively—but I’ll focus on the main protagonist: Bella.

With all her insecurities and usual teenage angst, she is very relatable. Even at my (let’s just say, of legal drinking) age, it’s easy to identify with Bella… which is good, because she’s the narrator. Indeed, only the immensely likable Jacob gets to take over narration in places (namely in the epilogue of Eclipse, and again in the mid-section of Breaking Dawn). There is a partially written version of Midnight Sun on Meyer’s official site which details Edward’s point of view throughout Twilight (she put it there after the in-progress work was leaked illegally on the internet, and she maintains no desire to complete it). Personally, having read both, I prefer Bella’s voice. She’s much easier to empathize with; plus, the idea of Edward being perpetually 17 versus the reality that he’s been 17 “a while” is much easier to swallow when the reader isn’t given access to his thoughts.

My one complaint about Bella is that while she starts out as very likeable (resourceful, intelligent and mature), ultimately her single-minded determination to become a vampire so she won’t get old and can stay with Edward forever just irritates the hell out of me. It just seems to send a message to young women that in order to be with the man they love, they have to change themselves to fit into his world – and that disturbs me.

Admittedly, Meyer has Edward strongly against the idea for a long time; that ultimately Bella’s vampirification (it’s a word!) is a necessity not a choice; and she does have Bella saving everyone in the end. BUT. Why couldn’t Bella have saved everyone as a human, as herself? Why did she need to become a vampire and gain freaky powers? It’s a frustrating irritation for me given the overall quality of the writing that Bella’s brave, if insecure, persona of Twilight is undermined by her effectively wanting to be, and eventually becoming, something else by the end of Breaking Dawn. I would rather have had Bella becoming happy with herself as a human, including accepting her flaws and weaknesses.

Setting aside my grumpy old woman grumbling, however, the Twilight series definitely deserves the success it has gained. Meyer deserves all the plaudits she has acquired and I’m certainly going to be checking out her adult-aimed book, The Host. If the Twilight series should be acclaimed for anything, it should not be for the hotness of Jacob and Edward, nor for the immortal love of Edward and Bella, but for the fact that Stephenie Meyer is simply a great story-teller.

  -- Rachel Day