official review of Twilight

All right, so today I'm posting a review I wrote on Amazon for Twilight. Now you can see exactly why I think that on a scale of 1 to 1,000,000, its literary merit is about a 3.

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First I'd like to say she tried. She really tried hard to make this a great book. But that may be the root problem--she tried too hard and it came out truncated and overdone.

Second I'd like to say that I tried. I really tried hard to make it to the end of this book. But in the end I found out that staring at the page was too nauseating to think about (it's true, I can't read Twilight for more than five minutes without closing it in disgust). So I gave in and listened to the audiobook.

So without further ado, let's get the train wreck rolling.

The first thing you trip over is the most ridiculously flowery and pompous prose ever. Observe the (in my opinion) worst-written paragraph ever that falls on you like a billiard table so early (page 8):

"It was beautiful; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered greenly through the leaves.

"It was too green--an alien planet."

This is an example of every writing error and annoyance in this book. Let's put a microscope on it.

1. Semicolons. They're everywhere in this book, and every time she could have replaced it with a comma. These distracted the heck out of me.

2. Trying to say something and locking herself in a box. She doesn't realize that there are different ways of saying something so it sounds smoother, but she just tries to "make it work" the way she originally had it. This is very amateur.

3. "It." Their branches hung with a canopy of it. Of what? Who knows...there have been four nouns it could have meant. This happens too much.

4. She's so busy writing all the unnecessary details that she forgets their purpose. Notice that in the first sentence she admires the green. By the next paragraph, she dislikes it. What?

And that covers the writing. On to plot and character, which, in this book, are the same thing.

The plot is nonexistent. It's page after page after page of Bella gushing over Edward until there's only about 150 pages left. Meyer then suddenly rushes to find a plot and pulls out a stock bad guy who wants to get Bella and Bella alone.

Why? Same reason as why a praying mantis spends most of his day cleaning himself.

Because he can.

That is the entire plot. All of it. She finds out he's a vampire, gushes over him for 400 pages, and then spends the next 150 running from a cheesy villain.

Let's move on to the characters, beginning with Bella, whom you have to spend every moment of the book with. And what a character to tell the story...a whining, selfish, and ultimately insecure person who defines herself by Edward and spends all day talking about Edward, Edward, Edward. And it's the most repetitive thing ever.

My favorite thing to laugh at is the way she describes his face--she can't just say his face. She always has to attach something that says how wonderful it is. This is one of the things that has made it to my list of the worst things ever (don't worry--it's not hard to get on the list. All you have to do is comment on this review with teen fury).

And Edward is a girl personality in "hot" male form. That's it.

So to sum up, she wrote a story and her characters happened to be morons, her plot wasn't there, and she tried too hard to write it. And I need to go to Walmart, pick up a copy of Twilight and five red pens, and get to work.

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So tell me what you think--you can vote for it as "helpful" or "unhelpful" right here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2L8ZGYJRAQ13P/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm and you can give your comments below. I love hearing readers' opinion!

Dawson