The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide

The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide
Stephenie Meyer
543 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown
Source: library
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

I'd never heard of the Twilight Saga until Eclipse has already been out.  It turned into this obsession for me; I bought Twilight, went back the next day for New Moon, and then again the next day for Eclipse.  Then I had an agonizing wait for Breaking Dawn.  My copies have literally travelled with me to other parts of the world and became irreparably water damaged on our way back to the states from Grand Bahama Island in 2010.  I'm not a twihard where all I read are Twilight books and other similar things, but I am a big fan.  While I don't worship Taylor Lautner's abs, I will admit he's a good looking dude.

So that was my position on Twilight when I picked up the Official Illustrated Guide from the library on Saturday.  I was super excited to read it, to learn some juicy tidbits and whatnot about the series, but in the end I was a little disappointed.  If you really know your Twilight stuff, you're not going to learn anything new by reading this.  I suppose it might be a handy reference guide to own if you're obsessed, but for me I'm fine with it going back to the library.

I skimmed a decent chunk of the biographies.  They were tedious to read.  I could have done without the fan artwork, but that's no big deal.  It wasn't all gloom and doom, though, I promise!  I was happy as a clam to read deleted scenes from the novels and found the interview at the beginning of the book to be enlightening.  The illustrations were awesome, too, as were the international covers.  In the FAQ section, I finally got an (albeit awkward) answer to what happens to Edward when Bella is on her period.  "The blood from a woman's period isn't the same as a cut; it's not freshly oxygenated, not flowing from the heart." (p.541) I call BS, blood is blood, but it's fiction, so I can let it go.

I would recommend this for every Twihard out there, for sure.  If you're a fair-weather fan, you can skim it at your local library.