For about three or four years now, I have had friends ask me to read Twilight. At first, I out and out refused because I do not like teenage melodrama. My friends would respond that it was indeed teenage melodrama, but I just had to read it. I knew I was being a literature snob, but I felt a certain amount of pride in not reading it.
Last semester, a colleague gave me a free copy of the book, and I found myself nearing the end of a semester and wanting to escape the fact that I would soon have an insurmountable pile of student papers to grade. Yes, I escaped with Twilight. I started reading it around 4 p.m. and finished 'round about 3 a.m. So...there. You got me. It is a highly readable book with a fast pace.
When people ask me what I thought of it, I don't know how to respond. I liked it for a quick read, a fleeting escape sort of thing. It is not something I would ever reread, but I will probably read the rest of the series, in part because I cannot help but finish what I have started with reading.
*Blah, blah, blah, plot spoilers-- but if you don't know any of this stuff about Twilight already, you're probably not going to read the book anyway, right?*
There were moments in the book where I just sort of smacked my head and said, "Really?!?" Two months later, the one I recall most vividly is when Bella figures out that Edward is probably a vampire and says that she is now deeply, irrevocably in love with him. Seriously? She's now somewhat afraid but even more attracted to him than ever. Had I not already known that Stephenie Meyers' vampires are sparkly, that would have been another memorable moment. Edward sparkles in sunlight. Like a million diamonds. He has bronze hair, a chest that is solid like steel, and his skin sparkles in sunlight. And he's oppressively stalkerish. And that makes her love him even more. I think this is why I kept flashing back to The Hunger Games. Gale and Peeta were both looking really good in comparison, and yet Katniss struggled with feelings of confusion, not a foolish, deep, irrevocable love (withasparklyvampire!).
Here's the thing. I should have related to Bella. At the age of 14, I moved from beautiful, wonderful San Diego to the St. Louis area. My dramatic 14 year old self, upon being told we were moving to Missouri, said, "But, Dad, we can't move to Missouri! Even the name sounds like 'misery'!" So, I get the melodrama and the misery of being the new kid from a warm place in a strange land of different, miserable climate. I was also a petite, very skinny girl who did not garner any attention from boys in San Diego and then suddenly received weird attention from them all at once in college (I know, I know, Bella's change happened much more quickly than mine). You would think I would relate to Bella, but I didn't. And as I read Bella's terse responses to everything, all I could think was, "Wow, Katniss does terseness so much better than Bella."
Even though I did not relate to Katniss (a strong girl who survives near starvation and can hunt and doesn't like to explore her emotions), I could completely see where she was coming from. Her relationship dilemmas made sense. Conflicting emotions for both Gale and Peeta? Yup, my teenage self would have gotten along with Katniss, even though the game-makers would have given me a 1 for a training score.
More than any other thought (well, maybe not more than repeated admonitions that both irrevocable love and sparkles are too much) was that I really hope this is not the sort of book my daughter likes when she is a teenager. I do not want her to read a book that makes it appear dreamy and wonderful to fall in love with someone who is dangerous. I mean, really, dangerous= bad, not sexy. And I really, truly, deeply, maybe even irrevocably, hope that my daughter doesn't like romance novels. Irritating man from a different social world turns suddenly attractive after woman is placed in some ridiculous peril. Wait? What's that? That's the plot of Twilight? And that plot repeats within itself several times over? Yep. Oh, wow, now I've just figured out why I won't be rereading Twilight.
The part that really got me, though, was the part that I read as a mom. I am telling you right now that if my daughter did what Bella did at the end, I would smack her upside the head and send her to a military school in Alaska. And if they don't have military schools in Alaska, I would go up there and start one just so I could send her there. This is all because once she falls in love with Edward, it's like he is the only thing that exists anymore. Oh, sure, she thinks of her mom and her dad the tiniest little bit, but it pales in comparison to how Edward fills her every waking moment (haha, pales...the pun was completely unintentional, but I'm keeping it!). Anyhow, the point here is that she is completely subsumed by teenage melodramatic love. That love doesn't seem real to me. For that reason, I can read Twilight as a book with a plot about vampires, but I'm not into it at all as a love story. As a love story, I keep reacting to it with intermittent facepalms and bizarre little furball noises. Blech. Smack. And then I'd get back into the action story of vampires. I'm not sure anymore if this is a review of Twilight or too much of a revelation of my psyche. Oh, well. I really did enjoy the vampire action story when not distracted by sparkles and stalkers.
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