Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

Biography : Stephenie Meyer was born in 1973, in Connecticut. She attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where she studied English. Stephenie married her husband in 1994, has three children, and is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints( mormons). She declared that she had a dream which gave her the idea for Twilight. The series will have more than 4 books, and the fifth Midnight Sun will be Twilight from Edward's point of view. You can find a first version of the first chapter on her website, here. Twilight was published in 2005 and won many honors ans was translated in 20 languages. It has been optioned to be turned into a film.

Bibliography :

* Twilight series : Twilight (2005); New Moon (2006); Eclipse (2007); Breaking Dawn (2008); Midnight Sun (unknown)

* The Host (May 6, 2008) (Adult fiction)

* Prom Nights From Hell (which includes a short story by Stephenie Meyer) (2007)

*****

Genre : Science-Fiction - Young Adults

American publisher : Megan Tingley Books, Little, Brown and Company : 9,99$ US; 12,99$CAN

English publisher : ATOM : 6,99£

Synopsis : Isabella Swan, Bella, is seventeen. She decides to leave her beloved Arizona, where she lives with her mother who just remarried, to come to Forks, Washington, to live with her dad, Charlie. She hates this small rainy town where everybody knows everybody. And on her first day at school she's the event of the day, everyone is talking about her, whereas she wants to stay in the anonymous. But she meets one strange, mysterious, intriguing, and god-looking boy who is now nice, now dark, Edward Cullen. From then on her destiny is linked to Edward's, but he has a secret, a dangerous secret, he and his family are vampires. But vampires who refuse to feed on innocent humans. bella is quite safe when Edward's around, until foreign vampires arrive and one of them is a tracker, and what he really wants is Bella. Will Edward arrive on time to save her? Will their love be strong enough to resist this dangerous difference between them?

A passage :

"I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful - maybe the perfect blod girl, or the bronze-haired boy.

They were all looking away - away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray - unopened soda, unbitten apple - and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster tahn I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.

'Who are they?' I asked the girl from my Spanish , whose name I'd forgotten.

As she looked up to see who I meant - though already knowing, probably, from my tone - suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.

He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarassement I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest - it was as if she had called his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer."

What I think : You must absolutely read this scheming, gripping, haunting, and a lot of other -ing words, powerful, sensual, romantic, in one word this vampirizing novel. It kind of becomes real once you're in it, you can feel Edward's steel-cold touch on your skin, or scent Bella's smell like he does. It is a vampire story, but more than that it is a love story between a vampire and a human. So if you like either, this book is just the right one for you, younger as older.

It's been a long time since I had a book like this in my hands. I started reading it in my doctor's waiting room, and by the time she came to call me I was already in love with Edward and imaginig I was Bella, I could have waited much longer in this room with my book. I couldn't let it go, everytime I had to stop my reading and close the book, I was totally obsessed with it, and frustrated, especially yesterday. In the morning when I got out of the bus to go to work I stopped when Bella was in a terrible danger, and how frustrating it was to wait for lunch time to open it again (and it was just there not far away, in my bag under my desk) and know what happened. All morning I was wondering if Bella would survive, if Edward would make it in time to save her, if, if, if...That was a horrible feeling. And to add to my frustration, when I finally reached the end (I was queuing at the supermarket) I discovered taht in my edition there is the first chapter of the second volume of the series. How cruel, it's torture, because I read it and now I have to wait for tomorrow to receive my books. I feel like a little girl on Christmas day who has to wait after breakfast to see what Santa Claus brought her.