Stephenie Meyer is the proud parent of the four book Twilight Series. It starts with Twilight, goes on to New Moon and Eclipse, and finishes with Breaking Dawn. I'm going to spoil it for you. If you don't want to know what happens, skip down to below the asterisk.
Twilight proves Edward to be a vampire, living in a family of vampires. They don't do much that normal vampires do, such as kill people, burn villages and sleep upside down or at least in a coffin. No one bathes in the blood of however many virgins and they don't live in a scary castle. Instead they all drive fast cars and go to school and live like normal people. These vampires are "vegetarians", since they kill animals, not people to quench their lust for blood.
Oh, and they all have special powers, as if super strength and living forever isn't enough. Edward can hear people's thoughts, Alice can see the future and Jasper can calm people's moods. I suppose he can control them, but he's a "nice person" and doesn't want to hurt people. I'm using inverted commas because I think that a nice vampire is just silly. Like falling in love with a rapist, or something to that effect.
In Twilight we meet Bella, the new girl in town, who falls in love with the not vampire-ish vampire. Bella nearly dies because vampires acting like vampires tried to kill her and then they all live happily ever after until the next book.
In New Moon, Jacob turns out to be a werewolf. It gets explained later on that actually he's a shape-shifter, but genes and whatnot have meant that he and his tribe can turn exclusively into wolves. So no full moon need have sway over them. There's also a lot of fuss about Edward leaving Bella because it would be better for her not to have a relationship with a vampire. He tries to commit suicide when his sister's stupid ability to see the future makes him think that Bella is dead. The family and Bella rush off to Italy to save his life. Edward and Bella realize they should be together and the book ends.
Eclipse is the only one in which vampires start to actually do anything vampire-ish. A group of vampires create a massive army of vampires, which is dangerous because newborns like killing humans. Edward and Bella get engaged, Jacob, who is also in love with Bella, gets mad and they all rush off to kill the newborns. Bella doesn't die. By this point, you really want her to.
In Breaking Dawn Edward and Bella get married. Bella doesn't want to be a vampire yet, she wants to have sex first. So they have sex, she gets pregnant and about two weeks later little baby half-vampire bites (literally) her way out of mummy. And Bella doesn't die because baby's venom turns mummy into a vampire. Jacob promptly falls in love with the baby, which is not as bad as it sounds, since she grows at about a foot an hour.
They have a war of sorts, between bad vampires who wanted baby dead and the joint force of the werewolves and Edward's vampires. It was rather boring. I wasn't really paying attention once it seemed Bella would survive to the end.
The end.
*
Well, maybe not yet. I am a female teenager, the series is directed at teenagers and females in particular and so I think I am in the proper position to tell you what I thought of this book. First, I shall quote some fans from the fan page on Facebook.
From Washington DC: I just started the series and find it hard to put it down!
Somewhere else: read all the books; love itt :)
Philippines: I LOVE TWILIGHT!!
I'm sure that the punctuation speaks for itself. Those people are the sorts that read it and like it. And, for your entertainment alone, I shall add this quote, from a person in Mexico:
I think that nobody feels the way I do about him. I really truly love him. Damn it I wish he was real & mine. I wish I was Bella Swan soo bad. Ive never wanted anything like this. I wanna meet Robert Pattinson:(
Now you can compare them to me:
I do not like these books, I rarely recommend these books and consider these books to be in the same general region as Eragon: not as fantastic as everyone claims they are, but certainly good enough for thirteen year olds.
The characters in Twilight weren't amazingly well thought out. It is as though Stephanie met each of her characters, learned everything about them and then forgot that her readers had not done so. There is more character developmentation in the first three chapters of the leaked draft of Edward's version of Twilight, Midnight Sun, than there is in the entire novel Twilight. This is disappointing.
Bella is not a person you love all the way through the book. If you take the time and think about her as a human rather than a character you realize that she is a very weak person. Annoyingly weak. She's the sort of person you'd want to thump over the head and scream "that's not how the world works you idiot!". Finding that the boy you enjoy looking at is a hundred year old vampire shouldn't make you want to make out with him. Describing the scent of your blood on a first date isn't often acceptable or romantic. She has two basic instincts: love the bad, flee the worse, and even then she sometimes fails. Sometimes she talks to the worse. Even though they want her dead. Her love for Edward isn't romantic. It is simply told. She loves him. No magic, no poetry, and she as a character lacks for it.
Edward is the vampire. He couldn't really get any less vampire-ish. Or any more chivalrous. Open doors, pull out chairs, drive her to school, watch her sleeping at night, every night, and save her from bloodthirsty vampires... Whatever Bella wants he shall do. What he needs to do is get a set of balls. He's a hundred years old, a teenager and he doesn't want sex. He's never had it and doesn't want it nor get it until the fourth book. He doesn't drink blood. Resists it, totally. "Only mountain lions for me, mate." He is, however, a more desirable character than Bella, simply because he is a vampire, and so is of more interest to the reader.
Edit: Once I'd read Draft Four of Midnight Sun, the leaked copy, I learned more about Edward. In the series it seems as though the reader is told "he's in love with her, that's all, move on". In the draft, though, I got to learn about the deep, poetic, thirsty (har har) love he has for her. He needs her. That isn't apparent in the series.
Jacob is the not-really-werewolf. I don't like that you think he's a werewolf until Stephanie goes on a long reel about shape shifters and such. But I do like Jacob. He has feelings. He gets hurt and angry and sad and happy. He has a wonderful smile. He feels left out of his friends when they change before him. Rejected when Bella chooses Edward over him. He thinks about sex. He likes cars and works a little at school and runs wild. He's an actual person you can sympathize with. And he's a bloody werewolf, which is bloody fantastic, because I love werewolves.
The Other Humans are mostly teenagers and are generally interchangeable with each other. One personality, tweaked a little to change into a boy or a girl and that's it. That's okay. They're normal enough to blend into the background, but also normal enough to engage the attention of the reader for the short time they're in the spotlight.
The Other Vampires which includes mainly Edwards family but also the various evil vampires you meet along the way. The evil vampires aren't overly developed characters, but that's because they aren't major characters. You don't need to know how they take their coffee when they want to kill Bella, who is probably thinking that she can convince them she tastes bad, rather than fleeing. Edward's family is a group of non-related vampires who have been changed by Carlisle, the doctor vampire who somehow resists blood. They range in interest and character development from Alice down to Emmett or Jasper. I like Jasper. I just like the name. You barely hear of Jasper, Roseline or Emmett, and it is really only Alice and Edward who are most needed for the outcome of the series.
So do I think you should read these books? Sure, go ahead. Knock yourself out. In fact, if you have a newly-come teenager in the house who doesn't read much hand her one of these, a guy probably would rather use it for firelighting. It will get her to read, and since there is a massive fan group out there for Twilight I think you can assume she will love them. You could probably read them and be entertained. May even find that they are the sort of books you don't want to put down, though I hope you do not fall as hopelessly in love with them as others.
What I'm saying is, they are good enough to be read, don't discard them. However, they are books for young teenagers and as such are a rather weak sort of entertainment.