The Book Lady’s Blog

This is my first Sunday Salon post, and I’m so excited to be a part of this group. Sundays have always been my favorite days for reading, as I usually try to run all of my errands and do all the weekend chores on Saturday so that Sunday is reserved for lying around the house reading and enjoying some quiet time. This weekend, I’m in St. Louis with my hubby visiting his family, so my reading time has been cut down a bit, but I’ve still been able to get through the first 400 pages of Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer. It’s the third book in Meyer’s “Twilight saga,” and I’m just thankful that it’s a fast read.

Ordinarily, I never would have read this series…but since my job involves promoting the upcoming fourth (and, thank god, final) book in the series, planning a midnight release party for it, and facilitating a teen book group, I’ve had to bite the bullet. I know teenage girls everywhere–and many adults–are completely gaga over these books, and I just cannot understand why. The story is essentially a love triangle made slightly more interesting by the fact that Bella’s two suitors are a vampire and a werewolf; but I do not think this can really be classified as a “vampire book.” It’s a pedestrian teenage melodrama in which some of the characters just happen to be “mythical creatures.”

I’ve tried to imagine whether my 14-year-old self would have enjoyed this series, and I really don’t think so. Though the books are supposedly “clean” and free of the sex and general misbehavior that fill other YA series like Gossip Girl and The Clique, the characters, particularly Bella, are obsessed with the desire to do the things they’re not doing…so there’s a whole lot of thinking about sex and wanting sex and trying to talk her boyfriend into having sex, and it reminds me very much of being in high school and knowing that the kids who were talking about it the most and the loudest were the ones doing it the least. Add to this the fact that Edward sneaks into Bella’s room every night to lie with her as she sleeps, and you have a situation that virtually no parent would approve of…yet Meyer makes it seem perfectly innocent and normal.

I also have strong objections to the notion of Bella as a strong female character or role model. When Edward breaks up with her at the beginning of New Moon, she withdraws from her family and friends and spirals into a debilitating depression from which she emerges, six months later, only because another boy starts paying attention to her. She then proceeds to make a series of irrational decisions and to put herself in dangerous situations with the justification that “when you’re in love, nothing is rational.” I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want my teenage daughter filling her head with these ideas.

In order to get around questions of the plausibility of her plotlines, Meyer handily dismisses the traditional folklore about how vampires and werewolves came to be–in Twilight, Edward tells Bella that the traditional ideas are all “myth, myth, myth”–and writes her own stories that conveniently tie back to Edward and Jacob’s cultural histories. This just makes me crazy. From Bram Stoker to Anne Rice to modern film adaptations, vampire folklore is a part of the popular culture and consciousness, and it was good enough to begin with. If Meyer had built her characters around these ideas rather than inventing her own histories, which range from outlandish to wildly ridiculous, readers would not have to suspend rationality quite so much, and that would be a good thing.

I suppose I should go hunker down for the last 150ish pages and find out whether the army of newborn vampires that has been created to find Bella–because her blood smells better and makes her more desirable than any human ever to have lived–has met with any success. And oh yeah, I think Edward might propose…wouldn’t want to miss that.