The book begins with Bella moving up to Forks, Washington, to live with her divorced father, who throughout the book is a decent guy. Bella soon begins attending the local public school, where several students earnestly attempt to befriend her. Given that Bella was evidently something of an outcast at her previous school, and given her de facto abandonment by her wayward mother, you'd expect her to appreciate the honest attentions of good people. Instead, she treats them all like crap. She belittles and spurns her schoolmates. She deceives and disrespects her father. And throughout most of the book, her decisions seem to advance the interests of just one person: herself.
Naturally, the only person to whom she doesn't turn up her nose is a preternaturally beautiful boy at school, Edward Cullen, who treats her like crap. Perhaps recognizing her own misanthropy in him, Bella is instantly attracted. And given the conventions of the genre, two things are inevitable: he will reciprocate; and he will be a vampire. Twilight does not skimp on either score. Cue several long, supernatural quasi-dates, filled with breathy teenage flirting and metaphor-heavy discussions about whether he should penetrate her neck.
Spoiler alert: he doesn't. What he does do is save her from a manufactured evil that pops up some time in the novel's third act and, just as quickly, is eliminated. This evil apparently plays a much more significant role in the Twilight movie. In the book, however, it shows up too late to generate any sympathy for Bella and her bloodless beau.
Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu 