Twilight

            This book has reached the masses through widespread promotion, 5 movies, a sparkling man and shirtless boys.  So what is the big deal? I read it and at first it was troubling attempting to ignore the writing style and fan fiction type of sentence structure. However, one I got past this I looked at the story.  The story itself is as old as time. It’s a love triangle that just happens to be between a Vampire and a Werewolf. Yet these “creatures” are not at all threatening, at least not the central ones. It is the outside forces that they face that cause any alarm in himself or herself or the reader.  All the characters are for all intensive purposes high school students and this book is definitely for young high school girls. Having said that I have a young impressionable sister and really don’t want her reading these. Not for the context at all (I read racier things with out knowing it when I was much younger then her) but more for the writing influencing her own writing skills, but I digress. The vampire is domesticated (and the werewolf as well in later books of the series) and it becomes about which bad boy she wants.  This vampire tale goes back to Victorian themes in that it tries to repress sexuality in the female protagonist.  Edward also compares blood to a drug, which is often the metaphor for the addiction and obsession vampires have for blood. They are the drug addicts of the monster world.  The Cullens themselves maintain superiority over the town with their wealth and beauty as opposed to striking fear into the masses. Yet they are also still outcasts and left alone at their own lunch table. And it is the repulsion and compelling nature of their coldness so to speak that draws Bella in. All in all I am glad I read it so that I don’t rely on other’s opinions of the book however my own is not that favorable.