Snark goeth before a fall and I'd no sooner boasted to a neighbor that I had dodged the Twilight bullet because my daughter wasn't interested in it (so no preview obligation) than someone made it this month's book club choice.
Mind you I've only read book one of four, but I find myself able to resist its charms.
I am, however, extremely depressed that anyone should consider it a testament to chastity. It is just gross.
Fully half the story is devoted to the two main characters touching, stroking and kissing each other and describing the electrifying effects these strokes and touches have on one another for preternatural reasons (one of them is a vampire). They may not be touching sexual organs, but the touches are certainly and overtly sexual.
It's a bodice-ripper, folks. Its purpose is to get you all het up with desire. To try to justify that with "nothing happens" is just you being coy.
As for the plot: 100-year-old man uses preternatural powers to seduce and manipulate a young girl, placing her and her entire family in mortal peril. Yeah, that's love.
An apt book cover, though. Our children cry for bread and we give them stones.
A little more as I find I'm not finished being ticked off at this ridiculous novel: true love ennobles and frees. This love enfeebles and enslaves. At the opening, our heroine is competent and self-assured (for a teen), moreso than her parents, in fact. As the story progresses she gradually becomes enfeebled to the point where she literally can't stand on her own two feet.
100-yr-old mind-controlling vampire to teen: if I ever lose you, I'll kill myself.
Teenager: I can change! I want to change to be with you.
And for all that, Stephanie Myers talks at us incessantly: she doesn't show, demonstrate, reveal -- she just tells. There is no action (apart from the electrifying stroking and the vampire training himself to resist draining our girl's particularly tasty blood by kissing her neck incessantly instead. Because the best way to resist temptation is to throw yourself into occasions of it whenever possible). The climax of the story is hidden from us because the heroine passes out and we're all told what happened as she lies passive in a hospital bed.
Do you see why I'm depressed that this somehow touches a chord with anyone? I can understand its appeal to moony teenagers. But grown women? Bleech.
