Stephenie Meyer's "The Twilight Saga"

The book and the movie

The books in question form a tetralogy (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn). First three and two thirds of the last book are written from Bella's perspective; one third of the last one from Jacob's perspective. She also started writing Midnight Sun, Twilight from Edward's perspective (but due to copyright violations, it most likely won't be finished). I really enjoy the genres, urban fantasy (fantastic novels set in modern, urban settings) - cultivated also by authors like Cassandra Clare and JK Rowling - and young adult literature (also Clare, John Green, Maureen Johnson, etc).

For the record: I'm not going to post a summary of the saga here since it only takes a few seconds to type the author or the title into a search engine and find hundreds of summaries, perhaps better than I would've been able to write.

The storyline evolves around vampires and werewolves/shape-shifters (the fantasy part in the story). The author has put some effort into creating her own rules (separating 'myth' from 'reality') in this fantastic universe by taking bits from classical mythology concerning those creatures and adding some of her own (a conversation between Bella and Edward in Twilight, chapter 9 goes through most of those but little things are revealed throughout the series). In a way, it's refreshing and also leaves the author's fingerprint on the story (one could compare the way vampires are described in stories by Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Meyer; television series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, etc - they all have something in common, yet also something to set them apart).

The story's about (dangerous) love, sacrifices and power. How much are you willing to give up for your own happiness? How much are you willing to give up for someone you love? Your own mortality? Will those sacrifices be regretted when looking back at them in a few years? What are you willing to do to gain power? How far are you willing to go? Is it worth sacrificing personal relationships? Those are pretty good questions to ask, and to answer. You get a set of answers from this book... perhaps everyone should create a set of their own. It's up to them.

What bothered me a bit is the way Bella was depicted: selfless, modest, clumsy, yet observant, a good character through and through (like she didn't have any faults; too black-and-white). How do you relate to that? I don't consider myself a model of a perfect character and therefore unable to fully understand her motivations. Besides, nowadays nobody expects fictional books to be moral textbooks... I would've preferred a slightly more realistic (instead of a romanticistic) approach to the characters (à la Robin Hobb, for example).

Other than that, I enjoyed the book. It was well written: the story developed at a good pace, an excellent adaption of the mythology, an intriguing storyline, focus on some details, description of the narrator's feelings (the tone of the story depended on who was narrating)... It would appear that Harry Potter has competition (at least in USA).

The first novel ("Videvik") has been translated into Estonian by Marge Paal and the second one ("Noorkuu") should get published by the end of the year...

As could be seen in the top of this post, the movie Twilight is to be released Nov 21st in USA (no telling on when or even if the film will finally make it to Estonia). The director is Catherine Hardwicke ("Thirteen", "Lords of Dogtown"), the main stars Kristen Stewart ("Panic Room") and Robert Pattinson ("HP and the Goblet of Fire" - Cedric Diggory).