All the makings of a teenage sensation. If Stephenie Meyer hadn't written this so well, you would think that she's the ultimate marketing person. She would have made Kotler proud. The target audience: Teenagers, aged 15 or below. The Positioning: Scary meets Romance. What could be more irresistible than a high school girl who finds the illusive passionate love of her life in a vampire, who 'wants' her equally desperately.Ms. Meyer delivers and more, with a lot of style and substance. There is loads for those looking for blood-sucking stories. And enough (& more) for those hopeless romantic girls (& guys?).
In short, Twilight delights and lives up to all the hype. It's a well-told story, evocative in places, dark in others. It's got a good mix of teeny-bop romance & yet it flows well enough to capture a 30yr+ nostalgia for some of the years gone by (though there definitely were pages when I rolled my eyes over, saying.. oh god, that's such a chick flick!)
I've always felt the power of a story is in the characters it develops and how real the reader can visualise them, and Twilight does that. It portrays Bella very clearly (although sometimes a little too helpless for my liking), and her mother, and her dad. Very early on in the book, you get a good grasp of who she is and why she is the way she is. It paints Edward & the Cullens really well too. You are almost convinced that there could be 'benevolent' vampires. The book gets the portrait of the fine mid-point between good and evil right.. you can see the shades of black & red throughout the book and the story takes you through the highs & lows of Bella's journey of finding her love amidst the centre of evil and pain.
In short, for all those vampire story lovers, this is definitely next in the series of modern writing linked to the topic, after Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. If the Historian combined Travel, History & Horror to produce a scary masterpiece, Twilight definitely has created the next genre that combines, Romance, Youth & Horror. Nicely done & will be looking forward to reading the next in the series.
