Stephenie Meyer wrote and published the core four volumes of her blockbuster vampire/romance series Twilight Saga in the years 2005 to 2010. I read the books back then but wasn't as attentive to reviewing them on this blog, which I started in 2007. Having forgotten a lot of the events and characters, I decided to do what I recently did with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire ("Game of Thrones") series: I checked them out in audio form on my Libby app and listened to them at 2.5X speed...worked again! Here are my impressions of each book...oh, by the way, plot spoilers abound here so don't read my summaries if you haven't read the series or seen the movies and plan to...
TWILIGHT...Bella Swan moves from Phoenix...where she lived for years with her divorced mother...to rain-plagued, dreary Forks, Washington to stay with her father Charlie and finish high school there. At school she notices an isolated group of very pale, beautiful-looking students: the story is that they are the Cullen family and they are rich, drive fancy cars and live out of town in a big house. Bella instantly gets caught up with Edward Cullen, who attends classes with her. They fall in love as Bella discovers he and his family are "immortals", i.e. vampires...and that all of them are long-lived, but that this family abstains from ever drinking human blood and only maintain themselves through hunting in the woods for animals. Naturally, from here on Bella has this secret of theirs to keep, but she discovers that there exists outside of town an Indian tribe that knows about the Cullens...one of them, Jake Black, becomes good friends with Bella despite her courtship with Edward. The story's climax centers on the Cullens' encounter...with Bella present...with three vampires who drink human blood. Their leader, James, fixates on Bella as a target and tracks her while the Cullens try to protect her...I thought it was suspensefully written, but Bella's subsequent desire to become a vampire alienated me from her perspective...
NEW MOON...After Bella's eighteenth birthday party at the Cullens during which. after a minor accident involving broken glass and Bella spilling some blood, Jasper Cullen freaks out and endangers her, the family...including Edward...decide they are too dangerous to Bella and they move away, leaving her devastated and depressed. Her father Charlie encourages her to get out and socialize, with little success until she goes out to where the Indians live and becomes close friends with Jake, who sees her as his girlfriend now that his rival is gone. But the Indians...with a legend about them shapeshifting into wolves...have their own secret to hide, and when Jake comes of age, a trigger event causes him to transform, changing the dynamics of his relationship with Bella. The Indians apparently have had a peace agreement with the Cullens that the "werewolves" and vampires would not fight under certain stipulations, but now feel liberated with their departure. But Victoria, the vampire mate of James from the first book, is bent on revenge for his demise at the hands of Edward and is now pursuing Bella...when our heroine dives from a cliff that the Indians use, she sees in the water what she later understands was Victoria's red hair. But that dive brings another danger...it is misreported that Bella had committed suicide...Edward reacts by going to Italy where the "head" vampires dwell in order to relinquish his existence: the race is on with Bella and Alice (her closest Cullen other than Edward) to stop him before it's too late...
ECLIPSE...The Cullens move back to Forks and the rivalry between Jake and Edward for Bella's affection heats up considerably with Victoria still on the loose and a puzzling series of murders piling up in nearby Seattle. There is a lot of background story discussed in this book as well as (in my opinion) way too much indulgent dialogue between Jake and Bella and Bella and Edward about their respective relationships...I got how things stood early on and hearing it all repeated over and over again got to be very tedious. The story's climax happens when it's revealed that Victoria was responsible for the Seattle murders, happening as a byproduct of her creation of "newborn" vampires for her army...and now they're coming to Forks. Allied with the Jake's pack, the Cullens take on the invaders, but afterwards Jake is devastated and flees when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing their upcoming marriage and her transformation as a vampire...
BREAKING DAWN...Bella graduates from high school, she marries Edward, and the two honeymoon on a special island off the the coast of Brazil. They find that sex between them...which they had been abstaining from over the course of the series...was possible and enjoyable but that Edward with his prodigious strength had still bruised Bella's body: he resolves to avoid lovemaking until she undergoes the transformation. But before that can happen, she gets sick and they discover she is pregnant with Edward's child...it progresses at an accelerated pace as they return to Forks. Jake breaks from the Indians who see the upcoming baby as an abomination to be destroyed...slowly a sort of alliance, if not friendship, develops between Jake and Edward. The birth happens, the baby is born, and due to the damage to Bella's body her earlier choice to become a vampire is now a matter of survival: Edward injects the venom and she changes. With newborn Renesmee "Ness" Cullen as a warm-blooded, beating heart human/vampire hybrid, the rest of the Cullens are wary that Bella is not yet conditioned to resist drinking human blood and keep her away until she can demonstrate her self-control, which they are astounded to discover that she has in abundance. Meanwhile, the ultimate threat is on the horizon: that ruling vampire group from Italy, upon hearing of Renesmee, are coming to Forks en masse to kill her as an abomination...setting up a giant confrontation between the Cullens and their allies and the enemy...
Whew, this should help me a little when my memory of this series begins to cloud again. I didn't watch the movies, but maybe I'll try out Twilight whenever it's on TV. Throughout the series I had a big problem with Bella's desire to become a vampire, but hey, this more than everything is a teenage romance series, so love and hormones rule supreme here...
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