As a teenager, I think I would have LOVED these books. All fate and destiny and romance and ever burning passion and undying love. Isn’t that always the dream of a 17-year-old romantic. To be declaring “I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER.”
As an adult, they were still very entertaining, although there are many facile aspects to them. They look big but the print is HUGE and the margins are WIDE and really you can just whip right through these on a crazy emotional rollercoaster.
Which is my way of saying, yes, I then read the follow-ups New Moon and Eclipse to round out that weekend.
Stephanie and I had a long chat about these. She’s right, there are so many things wrong with the 2nd and 3rd installments, including BAD BAD messages to send to teens and what is likely a bowing to the weight of the author’s fellow mormons’ critiques.
On the other hand, if you just give in and go with Bella’s emotions, they seem to “make sense” emotionally, if that sentence itself makes any sense. Basically: the things they do WRONG didn’t make them unreadable to me.
As a child, I was often obsessed with books that my mom just did NOT like the overall messages underneath the themes that were what pulled me in. (Elsie Dinsmore, case in point. Talk about a restrictive horrible view of religion. Not that I want anything to do with even the nonrestrictive kind but that’s another story. I also had an obsession with books about cults and books about people being “debriefed” after they had been rescued from a cult. Too funny, to me now.) But I think she got comfortable with the fact that I was able to really feel the emotional pull of something without necessarily having it change my rational mind.
However, again, Steph is right, you can’t count on a young reader necessarily being able to do that. I found these entertaining in a whirlwind romance, vampire love, perfect soulmate kind of way. But they weren’t great literature. They were an escape.
It kinda cracks me up how every “new” installment to vampire lore needs to put their own tweak on the legends. Oh no, no, it’s not that we burn up and die in the sun, it’s that when we’re in the sun, we’re just SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. Oh, OK. Sure. 🙂