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Twilight centers on the developing romance between star-crossed flirters Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. Problem is, Bella and Edward have no chemistry. He’s a 100 year-old vampire. She’s a helpless, self-conscious klutz. They don’t do anything together except look at each other. They have nothing in common–except they’re both virgins–and so they talk about nothing.

Oh, sure, they talk about the weather, music, and their favorite color, but nothing important like what they believe in or their values. These conversations about nothing are fraught with artificial tension and abused facial expressions. There’s a glower, a simper, a chuckle, a smirk, a sigh, a blush after EVERY laborious exchange. It’s meant to be engrossing and edgy, but it’s distracting and silly. Edward the Emo shifts moods from cocky to lustful to angry to protective in the blink of an eye. Bella’s range of emotions exists between expressing embarassment for her clumsiness and awe of Edward’s smooth skin, his sculpted chest, his fiery eyes, etc.

The story is told from Bella’s perspective. She’s your typical upper-middle-class teenager: spoiled, snobbish, and uninteresting. After moving to Forks, Washington, she looks down on her high school classmates because they are nice and emotionally engaged. She acquires friends effortlessly and for no other reason than to have someone to sit with at lunch. Invitations extended to her to go shopping, to go to the beach, and to go to the high school dance she treats with ambivalence if not distaste.

She placates these little people by pretending to enjoy their company, but she is really just biding her time, waiting for love. When Edward enters her life, she drops all pretense.

Edward, as described through the eyes of Bella, is just as one-dimensional and unlikable. He’s brooding, intelligent, good-looking…basically a fantasy realized. Stephenie Meyer spares an editor to overwhelm us with descriptions of Edward with SAT words like “sinuous” and “transluce
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