The "Twilight" Saga (No spoilers)

Thanks to you, my dear readers, I was clued in to the Twilight phenomenon in July after writing this post about the first novel's EW cover and movie trailer. I then started reading Twilight at the beginning of August, and not even one-third of the way through its 500+ pages, I ordered the remaining three books in the series AND Stephenie Meyer's other unrelated novel, The Host (which I just started). I finished the four Twilight saga installments in about 6 weeks. Knowing the controversy over the series' end (don't worry, I will write no details in this post), I felt like I should offer my thoughts to those who are still debating reading these books.

First and foremost, it gives nothing away to say that the crux of the saga is the forbidden love between a human teenager, Bella, and a vampire, Edward, and how a lot of people -- including themselves, sometimes -- don't want them to be together. If you get queasy easily, fear not! Amazingly, there is hardly any blood in these books, until the final installment (and even then it's not that bad). However, if you can't deal with mushiness, then just take this series off of your To Read list right now. Because Stephanie Meyer is nothing if not a gushy romantic.

Although I normally do not like to read about goo-goo ga-ga relationships, one compliment I will pay the first book is that I was totally shocked at how it transported me back to the way I used to feel about various boyfriends in high school. You know, when every single guy you liked must definitely be The One. When every glance from someone you had a crush on would be replayed over and over and over in your mind, searching for clues and hidden signals, and then you would discuss it all again in agonizing detail with your friends. When you got butterflies in your stomach just thinking about somebody. When you honestly thought you might die if so-and-so broke up with you. You get the picture. Teenage girls know how to bring the drama -- and I was the Drama Queen of them all -- so I couldn't help but be impressed that Twilight had the power to stir up those memories from almost two decades ago.

Um, so is it really, really wrong that I made my husband read this book? If you couldn't guess from the paragraph above, the vast majority of Twilight fans just so happen to be female. But they're not solely teenagers, there's a whole legion of thirty and fortysomething "Twilight moms" who are just as crazy about the books. I can only assume that these are some of the same readers of the cheesy romance novels with Fabio on the cover. Who else would keep those things in print?

Anyway, so while my husband was a good sport and read the book, he refused to read the rest of the series. And I couldn't honestly tell him that he would like them... the gushiness only gets worse, and the feelings that Bella has are repeated again and again ten bazillion times. It gets really old, really quickly. Though I fully admit that Meyer can weave a fantastic yarn, the woman is not a skilled writer. As one of my friends put it, "Bella is probably the most annoying protagonist of all time." I certainly wasn't reading these books because I liked the main character, let's just put it that way.

All that being said, I enjoyed the series and I'm glad I read all four books. They are nowhere near as good as the Harry Potter stories (and immediately distrust anyone who tells you they are), but there's something about them that I just couldn't shake. I HAD to know how everything ended up. The second book, New Moon, was the worst of the four -- painfully slow and repetitive, but still necessary to read in the whole scheme of things. The third installment, Eclipse, finally picked up the pace in its second half. And as for the love-it-or-hate-it end game, Breaking Dawn... I'm happy to say it was my favorite of the books overall. I stayed up until 2 am to finish it last Saturday night.

From what I've gathered on message boards, it seems that the readers who worshiped the first three novels were the same ones who despised the end of the series. Since I was fairly annoyed with the other three books, I applauded the abrupt change of tone and pace in Breaking Dawn. It was action-packed and all of the repetitive descriptions and plodding subplots disappeared. I personally felt that Meyer grew drastically as a novelist over the course of the series.

And so, if you are a female and you dig mythical creatures and you think you are patient enough to suffer through some really annoying dialogue and repetitive descriptions and scene-setting in order to be sucked into a story that is pretty darn fascinating, addictive and thought-provoking, I encourage you to at least give Twilight a try. When I was done with Breaking Dawn, I certainly felt that the precious time I put into the series was worth it.

The sad thing is that now that the books have grown on me, I'm even more disappointed with Twilight's trailer. I just fear that the movie will be awful. Did you guys catch the kid playing Jacob on the MTV VMA Awards? His face fit the part, but when he opened his mouth, my heart sank. He sounded like a squeaky punk. Plus, Edward was cut off?!? If you missed it, watch it here.

Since I know that many of you have completed the series, I will post a few more detailed thoughts on each book in the comment section, going in order, so that if you've only read a few of the installments so far, you can stop at the appropriate place and not be spoiled.

For those of you who have no intention of reading the books, will you still check out the movie, now that it's in HP 6's previous premiere date of November 21? You know I'll be first in line, as always...

- e