Twilight Collector's Edition (The Twilight Saga)

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•	Twilight Soundtrack

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
The book that started the phenomenon is now available in a deluxe collector's edition! Featuring a ribbon bookmark, cloth cover, ragged edges, new chapter opener designs, and a beautiful protective slipcase, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

Bella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Bella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Bella, the person Edward holds most dear.

Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.

Product Description
About three things I was absolutely positive:
First, Edward was a vampire.
Second, there was a part of him–and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be–that thirsted for my blood.
And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

“I’D NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO HOW I WOULD DIE– I’d had reason enough in the last few months –but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this. . . . Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of something else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.”
When Isabella Swan moves to the gloomy town of Forks and meets the mysterious, alluring Edward Cullen, her life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. With his porcelain skin, golden eyes, mesmerizing voice, and supernatural gifts, Edward is both irresistible and impenetrable. Up until now, he has managed to keep his true identity hidden, but Bella is determined to uncover his dark secret.
What Bella doesn’t realize is the closer she gets to him, the more she is putting herself and those around her at risk. And, it might be too late to turn back. . . .
Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight will have readers riveted right until the very last page is turned.

Customer Reviews: Read 2960 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

How is this book so popular? April 12, 2007
2332 out of 3059 found this review helpful

This book was a huge disappointment. I was eager to read it at first, because a.) I love young adult lit (it's one of my areas of concentration in my Master's program) and b.) I love vampires and the supernatural (Buffy and Angel are two of my favorite shows.) So I bought it thinking that I was going to read a literary exploration of adolescent love with vampires thrown in there to boot. Instead, I got this overlong, melodramatic, Mary Sueish wish-fulfillment fantasy.
There are so many things that bother me about this book, it's hard to know where to start, but I suppose the characterization is one of my biggest gripes. Let's start with the narrator, Bella Swann. I mean her name! It basically translates into "Beautiful Swan" fer Chrissakes! What kind of name is that for a teenage protagonist? Then there's the fact that we're obviously supposed to believe that she's special and wonderful and that she lives her life by putting others ahead of her--or at least that's what the author says. But if you look at the Bella of the novel and her disdain for her fellow classmates, her blatant manipulation of Jacob, and her barely-there relationship with her father--well I call BS on that account. In fact, she seems downright sociopathic at times. Hasn't anyone considered the moral implications of her burning desire to be turned into a vampire? She's going to spend all eternity as an enormous danger to the humans around her, quite possibly killing someone if she loses control for one second. Eternity is a long time...that's a lot of seconds that you could end up possibly losing control. So basically, she's asking to be turned into a potential murderer. Sure, an interesting ethical quandary, but the author scarcely seems to acknowledge it. I guess it's no surprise that this thought hasn't entered Bella's head--girlfriend doesn't seem to have too much going on upstairs. We spend the whole novel reading her thoughts and they basically consist of: "Forks sucks. I hate cold weather. Edward is beautiful and gorgeous and perfect. Forks sucks. People here actually have the nerve to be nice and try to include me in social activities. Obviously they're just using me. Edward is beautiful and perfect and gorgeous. What stupid thing can I do today to get myself nearly killed? Edward is beautiful and perfect and gorgeous. Edward is a vampire. His instinct is to rip me to shreds. But he's beautiful and perfect and gorgeous. I can't exist without him."
And Edward! The most boring character in existence. Yes, he's supposed to be gorgeous, yet I have no picture of him in my head. Also, he doesn't have one interesting, charming, or funny thing to say. His dialogue can be divided into three categories: 1.) "Bella, you are my moon, my stars, my sun, my pearl among swine, my angel amongst the unwashed masses...You are marvelous, you are amazing, I adore you...of course, I don't know you at all, because I just met you two weeks ago, but I love you very, very much. Oh and I'm perfect." 2.) "Bella, you silly, silly girl. Who told you that you get to think and state your opinions? I'm the vampire, I'm the one who knows everything, I get to make all the decisions...remember, I'm perfect." 3.) "Behold my [pick one] beauty, strength, power, speed, marvelous, endearingly quirky sense of humor, my amazing family...have I mentioned that I'm perfect?"
And the themes! I'm not one to think that children's/YA lit should be preachy and full of Very Special messages, just the opposite, in fact, but Good Lord! If there was ever a book that deserved the medal for Worst Messages of All Time to Send to your Teenage Audience, then this is the one. Girls, life is not worth living unless you have your man. It's okay to have no dreams, ambitions, hobbies, interests, goals, ideas, friends, etc... as long as you have your man. It's okay, and in fact desirable that you stay with a man forever, even though he may very likely kill you, or at least injure you, in the future. Growing into mature adulthood and eventually old age is a fate worse than death. True Love is based on appearances and physical aspects. And the list goes on.
Hey vampires are awesome, but not so much when they're turned into superhero supermodels who wear way too much glitter body lotion.

1 out of 5 stars

rabid fangirls please dont attack!! May 17, 2007
1222 out of 1593 found this review helpful

the amount of rabid fangirls lurking on this page and leaving 'unhelpful' votes to any review that has less than 4 stars makes me not even want to bother but hopefully if you are reading this it's because you're looking for an honest review and not because you're besotted with Edward Cullen.

I listened to this as an audiobook read by Ilyana Kadushin so I can't vouch for the typos and grammatical errors other readers have mentioned. Ilyana's voice was pleasant, soft and a bit raspy, once in a while some sort of accent drifted in but quickly disappeared. Sometimes she came off as if she was just reading boredly off the page without putting any emotion into the sentences at all. (In comparison to the vivid and lively Jim Dales reading of the Harry Potter Series or Anne Hathaway's reading of the Princess Diaries) all in all an ok performance, I'd give it 3 1/2 stars.

I felt that the story itself was very boring. A girl falls in love with a good looking face to the point where she's willing to give up all her friends, her family, her life, even her soul. Sounds like an alcoholic or a drug addict. Apparently the boy feels the same way too but he's more in love with her smell.
It's all pretty shallow. If Edward was fugly would she even care? Edward would be like "OMG Bella I love your smell! Plzbe my g/f!!" And Bella would be all '"GTFO Creep!" I glared and grimaced!'
You know I'm right!
The next bunch of chapters is just dialogues where she cringes, grimaces and glares glares glares, she literally glares at least once per minute. and if shes not glaring someone else is. I understand that when theres lots of dialogue the author wants to put tags there to make sure the reader can figure out who said what but this was pretty ridiculous.
after about 8 chapters of glaring the story suddenly picked up when three other vampires show up out of nowhere and the leader randomly decides he wants him some Bella. so, instead of just squishing him like a bug, the gang goes on a wild goose chase in which lame predicatable drama ensues and THEN surprise the bad guy gets squished like a bug.
and then Bella and Edward sigh glare grimace and cringe at each other some more. the end.

I really did want to like this story but it really feels like Meyer has taken a story that she had in mind that would have been enough for one or two books tops and stretched it into like 8 books to make her publishers happy. We probably wont find out why Edward cant read Bellas thoughts until we shell out $70 or so more bucks for all the other books to come in the series.

And by the way... GLITTER VAMPIRES!?!?! Enough said.

1 out of 5 stars

Glittery vampires? Oh yes. July 30, 2007
537 out of 650 found this review helpful

In a way I feel like the only teenage girl who really disliked this book and isn't head-over-heels for Edward Cullen and his God-like perfection. While I am perfectly aware that this is a YA novel and should be treated as such, even YA deserves some good ol' criticism sometimes. After all, nobody feels bad about ripping apart the Harry Potter books in a review, and they are aimed at an even younger audience.

Twilight could very well be the epitome of Mary Sue fiction. It read like something you would find on a fanfiction website and is clear from the very first chapter.

Bella Swan, the main character, moves to Forks, Washington, a city that seems to constantly be under siege by rain. She, of course, does not want to be here. She's not fond of her father; she misses her mother, but decides to make a great sacrifice by moving so her mother can travel with her baseball-playing boyfriend while Bella finishes school. From there the author blesses us with lines like: "Now my horrific day tomorrow would be just that much less dreadful.", and "It wasn't just physically that I'd never fit in. And if I couldn't find a niche in a school with three thousand people, what were my chances here?". If you haven't already guessed, Bella's life is terrible because she's shy. However, when she steps foot inside the school, despite her being oh-so depressed, cynical and stricken with a social phobia, she has already made a horde a friends and has boys on her tail, even if she isn't physically appealing. Still in the first chapter, she spots a family of flawless, gorgeous human beings. Here we meet the Cullen family- Edward Cullen in particular. Naturally, she is enchanted by them. Poor Bella finds that, by the power of cliche coincidence, she sits next to said Cullen in Biology. This is where the magic begins.

To make a long story short, her life is saved by Edward, she finds out he is a vampire and boom! They're in love. Madly, deeply in love. No suspense and no build-up at all. It just happens. All within the first few chapters. The rest of the book? Lots of smiling, glaring and explanations about Edward's gorgeous eyes, hair, smell and affection. Every time we see him, Bella comments on how his clothes bring out the muscular shape of his body and about his "beautiful crooked smile". Only within the last pages of the book do you get an exciting (which is up to interpretation) story that includes an antagonist. The first 400-some pages were as bland as bland can be.

The real fun is with the characters. They have no depth. They're almost laughable.

- Bella is beautiful but doesn't believe that she is, despite the fact that she has a vampire and the entire male population of her school drooling over her. Meyer tried to make her a strong heroine, but didn't quite make it. While she may write reports about misogyny in Shakespearean works, she also cooks and cleans for her lazy father who expects nothing less from her and follows Edward's every word religiously with no second thoughts.
- Edward is a brooding, angsty vampire with no flaws, perfect hair, beautiful eyes and a body to die for. Enough said.
- Edward's family members are cheerful (except for Rosalie. I think she was the only character I liked, because she was snarky and real) and, once again, flawless.

I finished the book and came online to see what other people had to say about it only to find that it had a rather large fanbase and tons of perfect reviews. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Different strokes for different folks as they say. I'm just a bit surprised that it is popular in some of the communities it is popular in- fanfiction writers who scoff at the idea of Mary Sue characters, for example, as if Bella and Edward can be excluded from this.

On the positive side, Stephanie Meyer has an interesting perspective on vampires: the fact that they can't sleep and some of the special abilities she gave them that not all vampires have and so on. Then again, she also made them glittery in the sunlight.

I've heard there are a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes in Twilight, but I did not notice them so I can't comment on it. I have poor grammar myself, so it is not as noticeable to me as it is to some people. *shrug*

5 out of 5 stars

Not just for young adults September 30, 2005
521 out of 757 found this review helpful

I am a big vampire genre fan, so when I saw this book in a magazine, it caught my eye. I have to admit, I felt a little funny even thinking of buying it, because it is listed and shelved as a young adult book. Well, I decided to "bite" the bullet, and I purchased it, curled up with it over a weekend, and could not put it down. Don't let the fact that you have to visit a different section of the book store stop you from reading it, (or of course, purchase it on Amazon, no one will ever know if you don't want them too). This is a really great book with real emotions all wrapped up in a vampire story, a young woman's story of having to grow up faster then she maybe should have because of her parents, and yet still dealing with all the issues that growing up brings with it. All in all, a great book, glad I decided to overlook the age description.

1 out of 5 stars

Bad vampire romance novel for teenagers January 14, 2006
433 out of 552 found this review helpful

I managed to read the first couple hundred pages, but after that it was so dull, trite and cliched that I just skimmed along, picking up the important plot points along the way. All one of them.

This is quite literally a romance novel, but written with teenagers in mind. It has all the prerequisites of your run-of-the-mill romance (note that I don't say "good" or even "mediocre"). Let's check them off:

1) Impossibly beautiful heroine who has no idea she's beautiful.
2) Mysterious two-dimensional hero with a dark secret.
3) Frequent urple prose descriptions of hair and eye colors.
4) The doormat of a heroine needs rescuing every few pages.
5) The Neanderthal of a hero runs roughshod over any opinions and desires the heroine has of her own, unless, of course, they coincide with his.
6) They suddenly fall in love. No build up, no rationalization, no sense, just a statement of illogical fact.
7) The hero's Deep Dark Secret is revealed and much angsting on his part ensues.
8) Out of nowhere the heroine's life is threatened and she makes an incredibly stupid decision that nearly kills her.
9) Rescue at the last minute and declarations of twu lurv all around.

The only thing this novel doesn't have is horribly urple sex, and that's what gives it the teenage-appropriate feel. Certainly it's not the characters themselves.

Edward, with his too-adult speech, at least has the excuse of being over a hundred years old. What's Bella's excuse? No seventeen-year-old I've ever met speaks like that. She sounds like a thirty-year-old masquerading as a high-school student. It really feels like the author just used her own words and made no effort at capturing what a real teenager would sound like. No, Bella doesn't just sound mature for her age, she sounds utterly unbelievable.

And as others have already commented, what was up with her clumsiness? Unless she has some sort of medical disorder, the only reason for it seems to be to set up scenarios for her to be rescued. No one is ever that "conveniently" clumsy in the real world, not unless it's an act to get attention.

Bella's character itself gets more and more annoying as the book goes on. To the point where you want to slap her and yell at her to stop making the female half of the species look bad. I've seen jellyfish with more spine than she exhibits through most of the book. She lets Edward dictate to her and push her around and never does more than sulk and glare. She never makes any real attempt at enforcing her own opinions/desires. The one time she actually shows some initiative, it's to do something so deeply stupid that you wish the two-dimensional bad guy had just killed her and taken her out of the breeding pool.

And good god, has this woman no common sense? I can give no credence to her claim of having grown up in a big city, not when she goes wandering brainlessly on her own down empty streets in an unfamiliar city. No woman who grows up in even a small city would do such a thing. We know better. Bella acts more like she grew up in the suburbs or the country, where they're still under the delusion that crime can't touch them there. She'd be far more believable as a character if that was the background she'd been given. But coming from Phoenix? I don't think so. It just makes her look like, "All new: Victim Barbie! Push a button and she screams for her man to rescue her!"

As for this new sort of vampire the author came up with, I have to give her credit for having some interesting ideas (and some really bad ones: glittery vampires? Is this like some new, Halloween version of My Little Pony?). "Vegetarian" vampires (ones who only feed from animals); cute bit of irony there. Some of them possessing different powers, how hard they are too kill, the fact that they don't sleep at all. That's actually interesting. But nothing much is really done with it, either. The focus inevitably shifts back to Edward and his angst and Bella and her increasingly mindless devotion.

There's a short paragraph in the book itself that, I think does the best job of summing up the many flaws of this novel:

"Oh well. He *is* unbelievably gorgeous." Jessica shrugged as if this excused any flaws. Which, in her book, it probably did.

And I think that's what the author is hoping for here. That her audience will be so blinded by the pretty people and shiny romance that any flaws will be overlooked. And judging from the gushing reviews I'm seeing, it looks like it was a good gamble.

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