Twilight - the book

Released: 2008
Author: St Meyer
Pages: 544 agonizingly stupid pages
Teenage

The breakdown: The phenomena that is a teenage girl falls in love with an old vampire.

So, the real reason I read this (well, half of it was as far as I got) was to see what made it so popular and how good or bad the writing was.  I did not surprise myself.
Regardless of how many people tell me the book is so much better than the movies, it's not the truth.  This book is just as bad as the movie.
The first time author has her own agenda to keep girls away from having sex before they are married.  She warns of all the bad things that might happen to the female lead if she continues to hang around and/or make out with this vampire.
Later on in the series we find that even after you get married, sex is still dangerous creating a child that almost eats it's way out of the mother, plus abortion is not an option, no matter what the circumstance.
There's too many direct moral messages the author is trying to hit you over the head with, for this to still remain a novel.  She should've just written a non-fiction book on how to raise your teenage daughter.

Anyway, the plot, teenage girl moves from Phoenix to Washington state in a dreary little town named Forks that almost never sees warm temperatures or sunlight.  She's the new girl in a very small town.  She's hit on by several boys at once, but is interested in none of them.  She does like the vampire pretending to be a boy who just smelled something bad and who looks at her as though he wants to eat her, literally, for dinner.

They start a relationship that sets the town ablaze with gossip and makes the vampire a bit of an outcast within his own "family."

The characters are always angry or filled with sarcasm, but beyond that, you don't really get to know them on a deep level.  It's all surface and the author goes on and on about how perfect and gorgeous the boy vampire is.  It's quite annoying and distracting to the reader's enjoyment.

The characters are also not allowed to talk without a lot of different versions of she said, he said surrounding the dialogue, so that's what not to do for writing 101.

I got as far as about 260-something pages before I quit.  The part where he's standing in the sun in a sleeveless button down shirt?  Why would he be wearing this?  But anyway, and he's sparkling, was just too much ridiculous crap for me to continue on.

1 out of 5 for showing me how not to write a novel.

Here's the review from my amazon.com account:

I saw the movie first and hated it. My best friend tried to persuade me that the book was better. I resisted. I am now in the process of writing my own novel and wanted to try to understand why this story, despite it's utter lack of good story line or characters, was so immensely popular. I rented it from the library and could only make it halfway through the book before giving up in disgust.
The female lead is good at hating things, complaining, and being obsessed with a "boy" who's over a hundred years old pretending to be a teenager.
The male lead is good at inappropriate emotional reactions to simple things the whiny girl says, and being moody or strange.
There is no chemistry between them. There is weak writing followed by a boring story line. I gave up at the point where the vampire shows his sparkles to her in the forest wearing a button down sleeveless shirt.
What I learned from reading half of this rubbish is how not to write a love story, which in a way is valuable, but for the understanding why it's popular....I'm still at a loss.
This book and movie was utter crap with no worth or entertainment value.
I would've given it a zero but the lowest I could go was 1.