Thursday, August 14, 2008

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2005)

I have been avoiding this very popular young adult series, because I heard it was about vampires, and as I have stated before, they are not my favorites, though I seem to keep running into books about them. I decided I was going to wait when this first one of the series was available in the audio book store, and so there it was.

The story is set mostly in Forks, WA on the Olympic Peninsula. Since I was going to Seattle for a conference, and was going to have a day to see something, I was looking closely at maps of the area and found Forks. A friend suggested La Push as a good beach to go to, and the characters in the book go to the beach at La Push. Unfortunately both Forks and La Push were too far for me to visit, but I got close and got the feel for the dense, lush forests described in the book. I later went on Stephanie Meyer's site and found that she needed a very rainy part of the country for her setting and she had found Forks through Google. Love it!

The story itself starts out as a fairly typical teen story - girl goes to live with her father in Forks, so her mother can follow her current husband as he travels playing ball. I think Meyer did a good job of capturing the awkwardness of going to a new school and slowly making friends. But then she is drawn to a gorgeous boy who always sits with his siblings and seems to avoid her. They do become friends and I don't think I would be spoiling the plot to say she discovers he is a vampire - but one of the good kind, that doesn't drink human blood. It definitely makes for an interesting relationship. Other than the slow parts where she keeps harping on how beautiful he is and why would he want to spend time with her, I think it was engaging, and I might even read the rest of them.

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