Twilight is now a bestseller and soon to be released movie about a young woman called Bella who falls in love with vampire, Edward Cullen.

This book is clearly appealing to the target audience of young girls. The prose is sweet and melodic, like an Irish song of forbidden love, often with particular lines being repeated like a chorus.

There is little to no character development, beside the immediate recognition and then blooming of Bella and Edward’s love. Bella is quite clichéd, with her good looks although she is actually modest and doesn’t understand why she attracts so many male fans at her first day of high school in Forks. Of course, the only one who doesn’t fall under her spell is the elusive and mysterious Edward Cullen with his sweet white skin and golden eyes. He, following the cliché, goes out of his way to avoid her, because he is so irresistibly drawn to her bloods scent and has to contain his desires for his ‘family’ are ‘vegetarians’ – as in they only drink animal blood and live in the human world.

While a very dominant chunk of the book focused on this “I love you, but I can’t have you” plot, the last third of the book has a small amount of action, based on a very weak premise and with overly elaborate plans set up by the melodramatic antagonist. This drastically weakens the effectiveness of the book.

Anyone over the age of about 20 would probably find this a long twisted novel of young hormones firing off in all directions with a rather unrealistic, though sweet relationship. The height of the appeal is very limited to teenage girls.