Peter Kramer/NBCKids! Moms! Twi-hards of all ages! Yesterday a reader asked me to share my personal ranking of the Twilight films. Today, in honor of the imminent debut of Breaking Dawn: Part 2, we're ranking the four books from worst to best.
Do you have an all-time fave, or a book you love to hate? See how your own list compares to ours, which, for the record, is the only one that counts. You're welcome.
4. Eclipse: Everybody loves a good vampire army, and this novel does have a fine one of those. But beyond that, Eclipse, at times, feels like the most heavy-handed of the Twilight books, and Bella can appear a bit clueless to the obvious shenanigans going on around her.
3. New Moon: The book lags in the middle, but so do plenty of other novels, fantasy or otherwise. And critics praised this installment of the series for its darker tone and deepening maturity...despite the fact that the heroine can't seem to function without her boyfriend, and she still serves as little more as a virgin who needs to be protected from vengeful vampires. Still, this book is where the werewolves are first officially revealed to Bella, which makes for some interesting times.
2. Twilight: The writing falls somewhere between amateurish and leaden. The heroine is a gawping, blank slate of a doormat who doesn't mind that her boyfriend spies on her in her sleep. The male lead is a caricature of a tortured soul. The whole first half of the novel is painfully slow. And yet, this first installment of the Twilight saga, with its vampire baseball and vegetarian undead, had a freshness and unashamed romanticism that made it stand out when it debuted in 2005.
1. Breaking Dawn: Just hear me out here. The final book in the Twilight series ratchets up the overwrought drama so much that the story becomes officially laughable: A vampire man cannot bed his human bride without making her black out, so he asks a werewolf to knock her up, you know, as a favor. Instead, a half-vamp baby is born, and the werewolf falls in love with it. Also: The baby is telepathic. Some fans expressed frustration with the lack of explicitness during the sex scenes, but the novel more than makes up for that in whack factor. Whether the author meant to crack us up or not, that's exactly what she did, making this book the most entertaining of the series.