Pardon the Buffy quote, but I just finished reading Twilight, and I needed to remember when vampire stuff was cool to me.So..... the magic that is Twilight...... hmmmm.....
Oh my gentle Jesus..... I heard much about this book from people I actually respect. How romantic it is. How wonderful the love story is. What a triumph in the art of teenage angst and romance.
Clearly, my friends have been doing drugs behind my back.
OK, it is an easy read, and perhaps my friends have difficult and stressful lives and spend their days reading big words, so they want something easy to read. This, a young adult novel, is indeed that. I'll even concede that it's a compelling read. I finished it in about two medium to long reading sessions -- about three days total on account of it was a busy week.
That said.... romance? Try stalking. I get the whole vampire genre. I know what I'm getting when I peel into Laurell K. Hamilton (who has jumped way into the deep end of the S&M pool -- farther than I'm willing to follow anyway. Her books now make me get phantom pain), and I don't mind a good Charlaine Harris every now and again. I lived for Buffy and even read a few comics after the show went off the air.
But Edward Cullen? As my buddy, Ryan, would say, hell to the no.
This is a teenage (albeit teenage vampire) boy who tells his teenage girlfriend that he will follow her anywhere whether she wants him to or not. He climbs into her bedroom window and watches her sleep without her knowledge. Their communication throughout is peppered with reminders of how he can kill her or hurt her at any time. To put the cherry on top, he tells her that he won't WANT to, but something in her smell and manner of being might MAKE him do it.
I have loved many men in my lifetime, one right now, but if any of them climbed in my bedroom window when I wasn't expecting them to, I would do my damndest to push them right back out. And if they EVER reminded me that they could hurt or kill me and then had the damned audacity to tell me it would be my fault due to my unwitting olefactory assault upon them, the fan would be ever so dirty from the shit that hit it. I would be a notion.
And if I were Bella with the monster truck, I would run them over a few times on my way to wherever the hell I knew they would never find me.
Meyer could take a lesson from Joss (creator of Buffy, for those not in the know. Also, one of the not-so-minor deities in my personal pantheon). He encompassed the whole obsessed vampire "if I can't have you no one can" thing. He addressed the issue of how a 243 year old and a 17 year old might have different ideas about forever. He captured the smoldering, all-encompassing, seems like it's soul devouring wretched world that is teenage love and specifically first love. Still, when things got dicey and violent for Buffy, that was CLEARLY A BAD THING. When Buffy dreams of becoming a vampire so she can be with Angel forever, she gets that THAT WOULD BE A NIGHTMARE. When she has to decide between living the life she was given and chucking it all for a boy, she opts to face the world and reality even though that means getting old and not always being better than everyone else. She gives up being special to have a life.
Bella, on the other hand, is readily willing to give up her parents, her life, her future for Edward. She begs him to turn her. She knows (from seeing him and his siblings) that this means she has to move back and forth from place to place going through high school again and again until people start noticing she's not aging. At least Carlisle and Esme were a little older when they turned and can have careers and a little more longevity wherever they go. The young vampires can never hold jobs or be more than high school students. It's Groundhog Day for these undead.
In short, I don't find creepy to be endearing or romantic. I guess for some girls male beauty means the difference between stalking and a beautiful relationship, but not this girl.
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