Stephenie Meyer: Queen of Tw

by Chas Newkey-Burden

Stephenie Meyer nunca se considerou uma pessoa com muita sorte. "Geralmente não tenho nenhuma. Nunca ganhei nada na vida e ninguém pesca nenhum peixe quando eu estou no barco", suspirava a autora. Por isso, quando adormeceu profundamente naquela noite de 2003, não tinha a mais pequena ideia de que o seu sonho lhe mudaria a vida para sempre, tornando-a famosa em todo o mundo e excepcionalmente rica. Na altura, não podia sabê-lo, mas a história de Stephenie Meyer seria lida por dezenas de milhões de fãs dedicados. A sua vida não voltaria a ser a mesma.
Stephenie Meyer é um fenómeno editorial. Mais de 100 milhões de exemplares da colecção Luz e Escuridão vendidos em todo o mundo nos primeiros três anos - e continuam a desaparecer das prateleiras. A sua popularidade estende-se por toda a em várias ocasiões de 2009, os seus cinco romances estiveram no Top 10 das listas de livros mais vendidos da Grã-Bretanha e nos Estados Unidos. As suas histórias são, também, um êxito cinematográfico.
No centro desta espiral de histeria, adoração pelos vampiros e sucesso financeiro, está uma figura inesperada. Stephenie é uma mãe simples e extremosa, que tem medo de livros e filmes de terror. É seguidora das normas estritas impostas pela controversa religião mórmon. Aqui fica a sua história fascinante e inspiradora.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Chas Newkey-Burden is a British journalist and author. His books include The Reduced History of Britain, Great Email Disasters and Not In My Name: A Compendium Of Modern Hypocrisy (co-written with Julie Burchill). He has also written unauthorised biographies of Simon Cowell, Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, Alexandra Burke and six official publications for Arsenal football club.

He has written for publications including The Guardian, Four Four Two, Total Football, Time Out, Attitude and The Big Issue; and internet sites including Ynetnews, The First Post and Guardian Blogs. A former Contributing Editor to Loaded magazine and former editor of the football website icons.com, where he was also Dennis Bergkamp's official biographer. Interviewees include David Beckham, Ricky Gervais, Frank Lampard, Rachel Stevens and James Bourne.

Newkey-Burden has discussed his books, football news and the Middle East on TV and radio shows including Sky News, CNN, BBC Breakfast News, The Today Programme on Radio 4, Five Live Breakfast, TalkSport, Capital Gold and BBC Radio London. He was featured on the BBC 2 documentary Cold War Kids, the Sky One show Celebrities On Heat and The Biography Channel and Fuse Television's documentaries on Amy Winehouse.

Newkey-Burden has a blog, entitled OyVaGoy, in which he describes himself as 'philosemitic' and posts opinions firmly in support of the state of Israel, and critical of those he perceives as being against Israel.
In July 2008, the British satirical magazine Private Eye reported that Newkey-Burden had posted positive reviews of his own books on the Amazon.co.uk online bookstore.

Reviews

[Antea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean I love this woman, anything that has something to do with her will get 5 stars. <3

[David Pimenta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephenie Meyer: A Rainha do Crepúsculo trata-se da biografia da autora que provocou a grande onda de histerismo nas jovens adolescentes e do grande sucesso de vendas, a série Twilight, escrito pelo jornalista Chas Newkey-Burden, conhecido por ser autor de biografias de grandes artistas como Amy Winehouse e Justin Bieber ou da socialite Paris Hilton.
Este livro trata-se de uma análise à carreira de Stephenie Meyer, desde o começo da sua carreira enquanto escritora do primeiro livro, fazendo uma análise na cultura vampírica ao longo dos anos e terminando nos planos futuros da autora com o grande sucesso alcançada especialmente com esta série. Não acrescenta nada de novo aos grandes fãs da série de amor entre a rapariga humana e o vampiro, todos os pormenores já são do conhecimento geral a não ser a participação como colaboradora num dos vídeos musicais da banda Jack’s Mannequin. Não foi um livro que desgostei, muito pelo contrário já que acabou por me levar de novo ao mundo e fanatismo ‘twilightiano’ mas é um daqueles livros para passar apenas o tempo e só dá informação a quem não contém o mínimo conhecimento sobre a senhora por detrás de um dos grandes sucessos da literatura depois de Harry Potter.

3/5

[Blysse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr Newkey-Burden is a serial biographer but I won't be picking up one of his books again in a hurry. This was a fluffy-puff piece of a biography which does not give the dedicated fan any new information than what is already available on a myriad of Twilight websites. He has not directly interviewed SM from what I could gather, but rather relies on interviews she has given to other sources.

He pads out the book by including information on vampire pop culture generally ( to be honest, I DID enjoy that romp through recent history), interviews with various of the TS movie stars and quotes from numerous reviews of her books.

I was interested in the psychology of the woman behind the phenomenon, and after reading this, that is exactly where she remains.

Borrow this book if you must- but don't pay your hard earned cash for it.

[Mekerei · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a biology of TwilightTwilight author Stephenie Meyer.

An interesting look at her life. She dreamt of a young girl and her sparkling vampire lover lying in a field. This lead to her writing the Twilight series. The writer repeats events often.

A quick read. Two and a half stars

[Kimberley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love all things Twilight so was looking forward to reading this when a friend bought me the book for my birthday. I have to say, I was quite disappointed.
The author seems to have pieced together bits from interviews or wikipedia and asks too many hypothetical questions and makes too many irrelevant references to other books and authors to fill in the pages. I enjoyed reading some trivia about the Twilight audition process and some other info but overall I was a bit bored.

[Joy Ashwell Callaway · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was good apart from the fact that it sort of went off topic all the time. Some of the words were interesting.
I don't know what to rate this book I wish you where able to do half stars as I would do three and a half. As I think that four is a bit generous!

[Maya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this was an alright book. But then again, I do not know a lot about Stephenie Meyer and am not a big fan, so most oft the stuff about her was new. If you already know a lot about her, I think, this book might not tell you anything new. But even for me it felt very superficial at points, and I wish it would have given more actual information, instead of (more or less) repeating itself and not going any further.
It was an easy read, so it took me just a few hours to get through it. There was nothing really outstanding about it, though. Newkey-Burden could have concentrated a little more on Meyer, not only on her in correlation to her books (mostly Twilight, of course, even in the chapters that weren’t even about Twilight), and there were a few sections I just found weird. For example, relatively early the book says, that Meyer's teenage fans are very critical when reading. The proof for that? A fan saying: "I'm very critical when reading but I loved your work." How is that proof? In what world exactly does that hold up? What kind of research is this? Like, I get this is not a scientific book, but that section just felt stupid.
If you don’t know a lot about Meyer, you might learn some things, or if you want some of the stuff about her all in one place on your shelf, then I guess this book is quite alright, but it was neither anything special nor an in-depth research or anything like that (or at least it didn’t feel like that).

[Allie // Kitasai · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only read this book because I reorganised my bookshelves and found some things I don't want on it anymore. Since it was super short I thought I'd read it all in one go.

I mean it wasn't bad and I'm a huge (or was?) fan of Twilight, but it was a little boring and in all honesty I prefer reading autobiographies over this sorta stuff as it feels a lot more personal. Also adding to that, it was super short and didn't elaborate on the sorts of things I would really like to know if I was reading a biography so it was a little disappointing in that aspect.

Overall rating is 1.5/5 as it wasn't actually terrible, just not my thing (even though I'm loving biographies and such right now)

[Luísa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4/5

[Jenifer Fugal · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Twilight sensation has stretched itself around the world, to the point where I found a translated copy of this biography at my local library in Germany. Like all good things from Meyer, I couldn't resist. I was curious how a biographer might garner enough material on a person as young and inexperienced as Stephanie Meyer to fill an entire book. My question was justified when I discovered that more than half of the biography was information about the vampire genre and publishing environment at the time her series came out. An interessing read, but a bit misleading to call it a biography. For writers and publishers and those interested in Meyer's rags to riches success story, this book provides valuable insight and offers sound analysis of how the Twilight sensation came about. The obligatory prologue about projects Meyer was undertaking at the time was less interesting, and I couldn't get myself to finish the book. I did, however find it interesting enough to consider buying a used copy of the English version to keep for reference. Meyer's story is a Cinderella story for authors and publishers, and we all love a good fairy tale, especially one that actually happened.

[Alexis Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this biography on Stephanie, I thought that it gave us insight to how she thinks and it helped us to see how down to earth and humble she is. some parts of the book that I did not like was that with everything that was talked about there was just too much information on it. this made for the book to be very boring and hard to concentrate on most of the time. those parts did not capture me into wanting to read more. when I was learning about Stephanie though I did want to keep reading and keep on learning about her. The author does not put her under a false light, instead she writes about her flaws and all allowing us to get to know the real her.

[Robin Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love books. I really love just about anything I can get my hands on.

I threw this book in the garbage. Not only does the author know nothing about Stephenie Meyer that couldn't be found on the internet, he pads the book with tidbits of information that may or may not have anything to do with the subject.

This was a waste of money. Please do not encourage this writer by buying his books.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was on our "New Arrivals" shelf at the library and I was intrigued. It wasn't very well written, but I got to get the full story in one sitting. Stephenie Meyer is an amazing person, so inspiring and creative. It was fun to learn more about her.

[Louise Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was OK - but then, I broke a rule of mine. I don't often read biographies - books ABOUT interesting people are dull! Books BY most people are interesting, even if not in the way they intended, because they can't help telling more than they think they are telling you.

[Louise Laing · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a very interesting book. The reasson it was a very interesting book was because you were learning about this famous author and her life and story

[Márcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written. Easy and fun to read.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good book love stephanie meyers.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was just ok cause I thought that it could have had more on just Stephenie herself.