'Twilight' - Stephenie Meyer.

Regardless of what people think about the book, I actually like the main cover - back before it was insanely popular, back before the movie and Twihards and fangirls and Team Edward's and Team Jacob's, the cover was what made me read this book sitting endlessly in crosswords,odyssey,etc etc!!! ;).This is truly a modern day Romeo and Juliet, only with a paranormal twist that has captured the hearts of pretty much every girl who picks this book up.

So this is how this starts :

'I’ve never given much thought to how I would die – though I’d had reason to in the last few months...
Surely it was a good way to die...in the place of someone else, someone I love.'

I never thought that I will get around to read Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’series, because I have been daunted by the size of it. I watched the first part in the movie version and liked it. So I was hoping that I would let the novel be and just watch the movie series. But when I saw the graphic novel version of the series at the bookshop recently, I couldn’t resist it. I finished it with a series of friendly visits and here I stand with my impressions:

Twilight, an exquisite fantasy, readers discover a pair of lovers who are supremely star-crossed. Starts with a new school kid and his group of sme beatyful friends. To add more to the above summary (you must be knowing this already and if you don’t I have to warn you that this is a spoiler), Bella discovers that the mysterious Edward is a vampire, but she cannot help falling in love with him. What happens when a normal high school girl falls in love with a vampire forms the rest of the story.

Now about the graphic novel. The book is a fast-paced read. I have heard that in the original novel, the prose could have done with some more editing, but because the graphic novel is predominantly about pictures, it doesn’t suffer from this problem. The artist, Young Kim, is Korean and so we can see the influence of Manga in the book. It sometimes looks like a Manga version of ‘Twilight’, with glossy pages. Most of the illustrations are in black-and-white but there are some pages in colour. It reminded me of some of the old movies, which were made in black-and-white, with some scenes produced in colour (for example, ‘Mughal-e-Azam’, ‘Nadodi Mannan’ and ‘Portrait of Jennie’). Bella and Edward look quite different from the way they look in the movie, but it works fine in the graphic novel. One of the things I was disappointed about, in the graphic novel, is that the story ends somewhere in between. I remember seeing more things in the first part of the movie series (for example, Edward introducing Bella to his vampire family, all of them going on a weekend picnic etc.) which is not there in the graphic novel. It looks like each part of the ‘Twilight’ series has been split into two graphic novels and so this first volume of the graphic novel is just half of the first volume of the actual novel. The cynical side of me says that the publishers are doing this to milk the cow for the longest time – I hope that is not true.It is basically a vampire-romantic novel between the lead characters Bella (Isabella) Swan and Edward Cullen. The author represents Edward as a charming school-going guy who is a vampire and Bella is s the new girl in town who is very clumsy. The story begins when Bella moved to Forks, a small town in Washington from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. She came to stay with her dad, Charlie Swan (police chief). On her first day at school, she met with Edward. When they met in their Biology class, Edward tried to keep a distance from Bella. He was very attracted to her blood. As he didn’t want to be a monster, he became her savior. He tried over and over again but he failed to stay away from her. Bella was also very attracted to him because of his ignorance. Edward was always afraid that what would happen if Bella found out what he is. When it was revealed to Bella that Edward is a vampire, she didn’t care. When time came, they introduced themselves to each others parents. Edward and his family used to call themselves veggies because they avoid hunting animals. After sometimes, the Cullen family found out about a new vampire coven’s arrival. One of the members of the new coven, James, figured out the relationship between Bella and the Cullens. So he tried to hunt her down. But finally Edward saved her. At the end Edward and Bella went to their school prom dance where Bella expressed her wish to become a vampire. But Edward denied granting her wish. This is the main plot of the story. I highly recommend this book, but be sure to have book two on hand.