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82 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
No punches pulled, November 4, 2009
This review is from: Nightlight: A Parody (Paperback)
It seems everyone on the planet has some level of familiarity with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Devoted fans eagerly awaited the next installment of the lengthy books. When the last book in Meyer's series appeared in August 2008, the books' fans switched their anticipation to movies based on the books.
Thanks to a parody from The Harvard Lampoon, Twilight devotees now have something new to read, although Nightlight's humor may be better appreciated by Twilight's detractors.
Nightlight pulls no punches in its entertaining vivisection of Meyer's mythos. Situations and characters from the source material are stretched, inflated and mutated to comic proportions. Twilight's Bella Swan becomes Nightlight's Bella Goose; the original's quirky lack of coordination becomes the parody's death-defying clumsiness. Edward Cullen, the vampire heartthrob, becomes Edwart Mullen, a "venture meteorologist with a bent for slowly accumulating money from .0001-cent web ads."
Edwart is not a vampire. A fact Bella Swan doesn't let stop her in her obsessive pursuit to date a vampire and have him turn into one of the undead. After all, Edwart doesn't eat his baked potatoes, snowflakes magically melt when they touch his skin, and he is able to resist the charms Bella is sure she possesses. All well-known signs of the undead to Bella, who manages to twist every coincidence to fit her world view.
The Harvard Lampoon takes every possible shot it can at Meyer's often clichéd writing and bizarre plot twists. Nightlight mimics Twilight's style perfectly, down to its mockery of New Moon's -- the second in Meyer's series -- depiction of Bella's months of depression.
True Twilight fans may bristle at Nightlight, but they're also the ones who can appreciate it the most. Without a basic understanding of Meyer's characters and plots, a Nightlight reader will most likely be lost. Those intimately familiar with Twilight will find much they recognize in Nightlight.
Hard-core parodies can be tough to get into, and the beginning of Nightlight tests its readers' determination. Absurdities pile up quickly to the point of, well, absurdity. The writing style seems juvenile, but mirrors Meyer's style perfectly. After the first few chapters, however, it becomes easier to settle in to Nightlight's rhythms and appreciate the fun it pokes at Twilight and its legions of devoted fans.
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43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nightlight: It Lit Up My Night, November 11, 2009
This review is from: Nightlight: A Parody (Paperback)
I hold that there are three kinds of people in this world:
- People who like/love Twilight
- People who dislike/hate Twilight
- People who live under a rock
And here's the thing -- every one of those people should read this book. It has, of course, everything one expects from a good parody: exaggerated new characters that lovingly poke fun at Meyer's originals, stylistic jabs (two words: blank pages), and Strong Opinions about sparkly vampires. But those things, though all done extremely well, are a given. And they've been done many times. There are Twilight parodies all over the internet, and a couple that have even seeped onto the shelves somehow.
What sets this one apart, though, is our heroine. Belle Goose is a clever hybrid of Twilight's Bella and... well, every girl of a certain age who has read Twilight and longed for an Edward of her own. When Belle moves to Switchblade, OR, she just KNOWS that every boy in her school is madly in love with her. After all, not only is she the new kid, but she maintains a studied indifference to her appearance that she knows can't possibly be anything but attractive.
But she isn't interested in any of them. She is interested in Edwart Mullen, the nerdy boy in the corner who has a strange taste for blood -- and who is quite obviously being tortured by his vampiris instincts, which tell him to either ravish her or kill her... or both. He doesn't tell her any of this, of course, but he doesn't need to. Our Belle is a woman of the world. She can't possibly be wrong.
What follows is the story of Belle pursuing her dream, which is to become the paramour of a vampire. I can't even tell you how much I laughed (and sometimes snickered... and I think, I THINK, there was even a guffaw in there) as Belle learned the truth about Edwart, and the truth about vampires.
Seriously, whatever your feelings are about Twilight, this is a book worth reading. Pick it up. You won't regret it.
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great display of biting humor! (no pun intended), January 12, 2010
This review is from: Nightlight: A Parody (Paperback)
I'm proud to be one of those people who loves to hate Twilight, but had somehow never heard of this book. Luckily a close friend made an inspired choice while gift shopping for me.
This book skewers Stephanie Meyer's atrocious writing so perfectly, I burst out laughing after reading the first sentence. By the end of the first page, in which the authors had already used 17 adjectives too many and laboriously described the protagonists' entire outfit and seated position in relation to objects in the car, I was in stitches.
Unfortunately, I fear the wealth of the humor will be lost on those who have not actually read Stephanie Meyer's excuse for a novel, but there's there's plenty more than her writing style being mocked here.
For example- lots of negative reviews here are posted by Twilight fans who claim to be able to laugh at it, but still didn't enjoy the parody. I think what they're missing is the ability to laugh at themselves. This book is part parody, part commentary. Towards the end the plot veers drastically from the source material in order to more effectively poke fun, not at Twilight itself, but at the teenage girls who can't seem to take it seriously enough.
That was a clever turn I did not expect to find in the book, but it makes the whole thing even more hilarious. (And sometimes cringe-worthy. I both laughed and cried when Belle demanded that Edwart stop treating her respectfully.)
Some of the negative reviews complain that the characters are stupid and the events of the plot absurd. I would direct them to the dictionary definition of the word "parody," in which elements of the source material are exaggerated for comedic effect.
Yes, there are a handful of typos scattered throughout, which I honestly speculated might have been intentional. (Satirical editing? Whoa, that's deep.)
I don't think I've ever read a book which has made me laugh this much. In short, it's a quick, fun read, and reflects essential elements of the source material more cleverly than the genre usually allows. If you enjoy reading 1 star reviews of Twilight for fun (I KNOW I'm not the only one), you'll enjoy this book.
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