From Bibliophile:
"Twilight" is the best YA vampire novel I have ever read. Readers will be able to relate to clumsy but certainly not helpless Bella and will fall in love with the dark and mysterious, but cutely geeky Edward. Their relationship is very believable; Meyer explores difficulties of a vampire/human relationship that aren't usually addressed in vampire stories. Bella's quest to discover Edward's true identity and their subsequent tentative romance is a decent plot in itself, and the homocidal vampire plot near the end of the novel only adds to the excitement factor. The almost mundane events of life as a high school student serve to anchor the story in reality, making the paranormal aspects that much more believable. No one should miss out on this amazing piece of young adult literature. -- Elena
From The SF Site Reviews:
Girl moves to a small, boring, almost constantly overcast town, where she attends high school and falls hard for a gorgeous young boy, who has the added bonus of being an outsider, seemingly very rich, and is initially trying to drive her away. I think that story has probably been done a thousand times in the annals of young adult literature and television; except, it turns out he has a pretty good reason for avoiding her, he's a vampire, albeit one of a family who choose to draw their sustenance from wild animals rather than humans, and while he's smitten by her, he's not entirely sure he can control himself around her. The interplay of their teenage desires, the contrast of his super-competence and her clutziness, his restraint and her desire to give herself to him make for an interesting and romantic relationship, which isn't without plenty of action. I would tend to hesitate to categorize Twilight as horror (not quite dark enough, yunno), but more dark romance. Certainly, for a young adult book, and especially for a first novel, Twilight is well paced, coherent, doesn't leave any glaring plot gaps, while maintaining a certain mystery, and is even quite a page turner in places; and while it hits most of the right spots, I can't say that -- admittedly as an adult male reader -- it "satisfied" me.
Part of this I think is that I may have somewhat dated, read Gothic, non-rationalistic preconceptions of what literary vampires should be: fundamentally evil in both a moral and theological sense (couched in terms of werewolves, more like Montague Summers' view than Sabine Baring-Gould's), cat-like in their pleasure in torturing their prey (though an element of this appears briefly), lurking in dark gloomy places, not the suave and civilised "nouveau-vampire" of Anne Rice and others. Again, I'm not saying that Stephenie Meyer doesn't do a good job of setting and justifying the parameters for her vampires, so it's not that she hasn't spelled out who and what her vampires are, they just aren't scary, violent perhaps but not scary. But, when I think of the best modern tales of young adults facing lycanthropy, vampirism or creatures of pagan lore I've come across, I think of Pat Murphy's werewolf novella "An American Childhood" (since expanded into the novel Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles, which I have not read), and Megan Lindholm's Cloven Hooves (coincidentally also set in Washington State), there is a certain element of risk realized and sin (a very potent element of yore) that doesn't strike me in Twilight. Also, while it is perhaps intended to serve as a contrast to the vampire culture, high school life in Forks, WA, while presenting some real issues, is about as underlyingly tame as Degrassi Junior High.
All this said, I don't believe that the reader who enjoys Twilight, and I'll admit begrudgingly to being one, is going to be enjoying it for its overt horror elements or its portrayal of vampires -- after all the vampires could well be street gang members turned from but drawn to violence, rather than literal blood, if the story was shifted to an inner city -- but rather for its elements of seemingly doomed and high-risk romance. In this regard, I hazard to guess that Twilight will likely appeal to a greater extent to young women than men, but would be entertaining to either. -- Georges T. Dodds
From Amazon.com
"Softly he brushed my cheek, then held my face between his marble hands. 'Be very still,' he whispered, as if I wasn't already frozen. Slowly, never moving his eyes from mine, he leaned toward me. Then abruptly, but very gently, he rested his cold cheek against the hollow at the base of my throat."
As Shakespeare knew, love burns high when thwarted by obstacles. In Twilight, an exquisite fantasy by Stephenie Meyer, readers discover a pair of lovers who are supremely star-crossed. Bella adores beautiful Edward, and he returns her love. But Edward is having a hard time controlling the blood lust she arouses in him, because--he's a vampire. At any moment, the intensity of their passion could drive him to kill her, and he agonizes over the danger. But, Bella would rather be dead than part from Edward, so she risks her life to stay near him, and the novel burns with the erotic tension of their dangerous and necessarily chaste relationship.
Meyer has achieved quite a feat by making this scenario completely human and believable. She begins with a familiar YA premise (the new kid in school), and lulls us into thinking this will be just another realistic young adult novel. Bella has come to the small town of Forks on the gloomy Olympic Peninsula to be with her father. At school, she wonders about a group of five remarkably beautiful teens, who sit together in the cafeteria but never eat. As she grows to know, and then love, Edward, she learns their secret. They are all rescued vampires, part of a family headed by saintly Carlisle, who has inspired them to renounce human prey. For Edward's sake they welcome Bella, but when a roving group of tracker vampires fixates on her, the family is drawn into a desperate pursuit to protect the fragile human in their midst. The precision and delicacy of Meyer's writing lifts this wonderful novel beyond the limitations of the horror genre to a place among the best of YA fiction. (Ages 12 and up) --Patty Campbell
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