Twilight

It's been a really, really long time that I've bought a book and read it from cover to cover in about 2 days (and this book is over 500 pages). This book brought me back to my old ways of getting lost in a story very quickly. From the first page of the first chapter, I was immersed immediately into the lives of these unknowns.

I must've passed by this book everytime I visited my bookstore a hundred or so times. And everytime I passed it, I would stop, pick it up, and put it back down. For some reason, I picked it up yesterday and decided I'd get it. My only regret is that I didn't buy the other two books that followed it as well.

This story is about vampires who live among humans. The concept of vampires has always fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I particularly am drawn to stories of vampires who have human characteristics about them. The ones who are able to quell their desires to drink human blood. The ones who fall in love and have relationships. Vampires are always perceived to be monsters, so when I read the back cover of this book, I knew that this was more than just vampires who sucked blood. I'm just a sucker for a love story I suppose.

This story is about a 17 year old vampire, (although he's more like 108 years old), Edward, who falls in love with a girl named Isabella (Bella for short). She is new to the town of Forks, Washington and has moved to live with her dad while her mom can travel freely with her new husband (who is looking to be signed to a minor league baseball team and isn't exactly stationed in one particular town). At first Edward tries to avoid her because he genuinely fears for her safety (he is afraid that he will give into temptation and drink her), but he takes precautions so that he can be with her. And she is utterly and completely intoxicated with him and, her learning what he is makes her feelings for him grow even stronger. His family is accepting of his love for her and go to great lengths to save her from a possible savage death by another vampire who tries to kill her. By the end of the book, Bella wishes to be transformed into a vampire so that she can spend eternity with Edward but he refuses to subject her to that. But, there are two other books that follow so who knows what will happen.

This is the author's (Stephenie Meyer) first book and I have to say that she did a really good job in getting the reader involved in the lives of these characters right off the bat. I couldn't put the book down. The love story she created was so forbidden, yet so beautiful and sacred at the same time. She created Edward to have such amazing human qualities that it was no wonder Bella could fall for him so easily ... I could not blame her one bit.

Well you can bet that I will be buying book two and three of this series. It was that captivating.

(Eclipse - the third book - was reviewed by Pam.)