page_title: Stephenie Meyer
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Stephenie Meyer / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephenie Meyer. Italiano: Stephenie Meyer 2009
context_page_description: Stephenie Meyer is an American novelist. She is best known for her vampire romance series Twilight, which has sold over 100 million copies, with translations into 37 different languages. Meyer was the bestselling author of 2008 and 2009 in the U.S., having sold over 29 million books in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2009. Meyer received the 2009 Children's Book of the Year award from the British Book Awards for her Twilight series finale Breaking Dawn.
  An avid young reader, she attended Brigham Young University, marrying at the age of twenty-one, before graduating with a degree in English in 1997. With no prior experience as an author, the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream. Influenced by the work of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, she wrote Twilight soon thereafter. After many rejections, Little, Brown and Company offered her a $750,000 three-book deal which led to a four-book series, several spin-off novels and novellas, and a series of commercially successful film adaptations. Aside from young adult novels, Meyer has ventured into adult novels with The Host and The Chemist.
context_section_description: The reception of Meyer and her novels has been mixed. Entertainment Weekly has stated that Meyer is "the world's most popular vampire novelist since Anne Rice", while The Guardian described her as an "imaginative storyteller, a prolific author and a newly powerful figure in the publishing market." Wayne Janes of the Toronto Sun agreed, saying "Meyer's success points up another trend—the virtual domination of the best-seller lists the last few years by what would normally be classified as young adult fiction," and noted, "In the absence of a new Harry Potter adventure, teens, fantasy enthusiasts and women (sales are mostly to females) who swoon at the idea of a virginal James Dean-ish vampire made Meyer the go-to gal for chaste love." Tymon Smith of The Times has described her as the "superstar of young adult fiction".
  Meyer was named one of MSN Lifestyle's "Most Influential Women of 2008" where she was described as a "literary luminary". She was also ranked No. 49 on Time magazine's list of the "100 Most Influential People in 2008", and was included in their list of "People Who Mattered", with author Lev Grossman noting, "Maybe Americans aren't ready for a Mormon presidential nominee yet. But they're more than ready to anoint a Mormon as the best-selling novelist of the year."
  She was ranked No. 82 on Vanity Fair's list of the "Top 100 Information Age Powers" of 2009. Meyer was featured in an issue of the biographical comic Female Force, a Bluewater Productions title which celebrates influential women in society and pop culture. Meyer was the second bestselling author of the decade, according to a list published by Amazon, beaten by J. K. Rowling.
  Despite Meyer's success, her novels have been highly criticized. The New York Times called the premise of Twilight "attractive and compelling"; however, the review continues, "the book suffers at times from overearnest, amateurish writing", indicating that Meyer's relied too much on "telling" rather than "showing" and that there were excessive references to Edward's attractiveness and Bella's swooning. An article from The Guardian criticized Bella's character, calling her "a clumsy, selfish nincompoop with the charisma of a boiled potato" and criticized Edward's portrayal as the "perfect little gentleman" who constantly counters Bella's sexual advances. NPR criticized the novel for being a repetitive "jackhammer" masked behind ornate language. Furthermore, they found the story uninteresting and the main character unlikeable. Entertainment Weekly stated that the narrative of Breaking Dawn was at times so chaotic and outrageous that Meyer shifted the point of view to Jacob Black which only toned down the mayhem of the plot for so long.
  Novelist Orson Scott Card said, "[Stephenie Meyer] writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She's the real thing". In an interview with Newsweek, author Jodi Picoult said, "Stephenie Meyer has gotten people hooked on books, and that's good for all of us." Comparing Meyer to J. K. Rowling, Stephen King stated: "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good". King went on to say that the appeal of her books were because, "[she's] opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books." American religious history scholar Jana Riess had mixed reactions to Meyer's novels. She found the Mormon theology which influences her imaginative works at times beautiful and complex. However, she qualifies Meyer as a gifted storyteller, not a gifted writer, noting numerous technical flaws in her novels. Furthermore, Riess criticized the "retrogressive gender stereotypes" in Meyer's novels.
  The Quileute do have a tradition that their ancestors transformed from wolves to people, but most of the descriptions of the Quileute in the novel are inaccurate. The Quileute tribe described her use of their traditions in the books and films and subsequent merchandising as cultural theft.
caption: Meyer on her book tour for Eclipse in 2007
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