stephenie meyer

Twilight the Graphic Novel

librarysteph LIT for YA , , , ,

There are a lot of books that I think would work great as graphic novels. Books that are action oriented or set in places with beautiful fantasy landscapes, or that have the opportunity for really funny facial expressions would be great.

As I suspected, Twilight isn’t a book that works for me in graphic novel form. Let me start by saying Young Kim is awesome artist and I would enjoy other work by her, this is just the type of book that I personally enjoy in this format.

Here’s why

  • You can’t BE Bella when looking at her, and I think many of fans of twilight wanted to be in her role for the story
  • There isn’t enough action. Even though the panels of just Bella’s eyes or just Edward’s eyes, or even Jake’s eyes are stunning visually, they start to lose meaning when it seems like half of the book is just beautiful eyes
  • The insight into a teen girl’s mind is missing, I liked Meyer’s words between dialogue that are gone

Sidenotes

  • I find men in manga to be to feminine, this is not exclusive to this work or this artist, I just find manga men way more girly than I like to picture men in books and I wanted to have attractive guys like Jamie in the Outlander graphic novel (with more clothes since it’s YA)
  • I thought it was weird how much she sweat, it seemed like more than half the time a huge drip of sweat was on her face
  • I liked the selective use of colour, with Edward’s eyes and the most vivid moments being the only source of colour. Except for when she was describing the vampires as pale, it was funny because everyone looked pale

The Short Second Life….

librarysteph LIT for YA ,

cover artMeyer’s Bree Tanner didn’t succeed in having me care more about that particular character, in fact I had more sympathy for her before I read it, but it did have some interesting ideas that could have been fleshed out more:

  • When people tell us our limitations, we as a society generally believe them. Riley convinces the newborn vamps that sunlight will be their death, and for the most part they believe him. Whether it was Meyer’s intention or not I think we should take this as a reminder that we can’t believe everything about our limitations. If women had believed men that they were not capable of independence, intelligence or work outside the home, if no one had taken that risk and faced the sunlight then the women of our generation would not have the self-awareness and rights that we do.  The same could be said for races and ethnicities that were told they had  limitations they challenged. Don’t let myths limit you, is the best message of the novella.
  • I found Freaky Fred and the exploration of dark gifts interesting
  • I like that the kind of person they were before they were a vampire influences what kind of vampire they will be, they don’t loose themselves completely even if their human life is difficult to remember

Worth a quick read but I should have waited for my library hold rather than buy it. I was a bit disappointed, but it wasn’t particularly bad.

Eclipse

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So I started to make a library display relating to Eclipse for its release, but all of the YA about vampires and most of the recent Ya about werewolves was already checked out… so I guess that would have been unnecessary promoting of the genre.

As for the movie I think it was the best adaptation of the series so far. The dialogue between Jake and Edward in the tent was pretty good, they mocked themselves with the “doesn’t he own a shirt” line, some decent fight scenes and I’ve always loved Charlies portrayal in the films. Even my twilight mocking boyfriend agreed “if it wasn’t for the acting that would have been compelling”.

I still have serious doubts about how they can possibly adapt the Host to the screen. I LOVED the book but the beauty of it is the internal dialogue between the host and the parasite, the strange relationship they develop and how that allows for other very human for distinctly non-human relationships.That the book was from the parasites point of view made it fresh and interesting, and maintaining that POV in a film will be hard without a LOT of narration, which does not go over well with general public.

In any case,  I will definitely make a kick a$$ display when the Host comes out, because it was an awesome book and if nothing else I hope the upcoming movie will get people to read it and other insightful speculative fiction.

(my apostrophe key isnt working, forgive the typos)