Long time no post, and a bit of review
It's been quite a while since I've updated, which is not because I'm not reading and admiring everybody else's LJs, but because I wind up spending most of my that-kind-of-time on Google Reader these days. So -- I lurve you all very dearly, and I'm out there, but mostly sharing stuff instead of writing all personal-like as I ought to be doing.
Anyway, the subject of today's post is the now-ubiquitous Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, which I've just finished reading. (Why? Because apparently damn near all the teenagers in the universe are reading it at the moment. At the very least, it's probably going to become part of the pop culture canon, and I ought to give it a chance and maybe find myself a treasure the way I did with Harry Potter.)
So the rest of this goes in a cut, even though I'm not going to be especially spoiler-y...
The first thing you ought to know is that this book is so drearily, unremittingly safe that any parent who's having a fit about it either hasn't read it or considers even looking at the word "vampire" to be a sin against our Lord and Saviour. I'm being serious here: total G rating, even when considering the one (1) action scene in the entire book. The Rats of NIMH is more gutty and scary than this book. Jane Eyre has far, far more unbridled animal passion that this book, in which the passion is so very thoroughly bridled that it gives pony rides at a petting zoo.
The second thing you ought to know is that it's a 500-page novel, and only between roughly pages 390 and 460 is there any meaningful conflict, which is necessary to create what we conventionally call a story. Again, I'm being completely serious: there is no dramatic tension whatsoever until the book is almost 80% over.
That said, my biggest complaint is that the main character, our heroine, is utterly blank. There is nothing whatsoever interesting or distinctive about her. She has no talents. She has no hobbies. She has no interests (save a teenage vampire). She has no opinions. She has no curiosity in the world around her. She isn't a terrible person, mind you, just a thoroughly boring one who doesn't really deserve the dignity of a name if she's not going to rise from obscurity at least to the point of having a personal foible or two. We learn two things about her: she smells good to the undead, and she's clumsy. Both of these are far more interesting than anything she does, or any thought that passes through her head.
Complaint number two is that of subplots there are none. You know all those little threads of narrative that get woven together in the end in other, more complicated books, even ones for kids, like Charlotte's Web or Anne of Green Gables or even freaking Ramona the Brave? There aren't any here. There is only the one, single-threaded story, and it is a short story that could have been told inside of eight pages without an additional 490 pages of exasperating and superfluous conversations.
Speaking of conversations, there's actually only one of them between the two main characters, but that doesn't stop them from having it again on four dozen separate occasions. They vary only in the wording of the stubby sentences and when Edward gets unaccountably disgruntled and Bella is "dazzled"/"awestruck"/"fascinated".
World, I have a confession to make: despite having a functional Y chromosome, I do like me a well-written romance quite a bit. It doesn't have to have hot torrid monkeysex or apocalyptic bloodshed, but it does have to have a plot and interesting characters for whom I can feel a little bit of empathy, and this book ain't got them. Insofar as the author seems to have had any goal at all, it's been to write a Vampire Wub Novel that's more suitable for small children than Tom Sawyer or Where the Wild Things Are. Every children's book I adored while growing up is an order of magnitude more subversive than this crap, and I'm honestly a little sad for kids today that this is being offered to them with a straight face as a thrilling read. It isn't. There's no forbidden fruit here, just a graham cracker designed to get you to stop touching yourself.
(Postscript: I was not surprised in the slightest to learn that the author is a graduate of BYU.)
Anyway, the subject of today's post is the now-ubiquitous Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, which I've just finished reading. (Why? Because apparently damn near all the teenagers in the universe are reading it at the moment. At the very least, it's probably going to become part of the pop culture canon, and I ought to give it a chance and maybe find myself a treasure the way I did with Harry Potter.)
So the rest of this goes in a cut, even though I'm not going to be especially spoiler-y...
The first thing you ought to know is that this book is so drearily, unremittingly safe that any parent who's having a fit about it either hasn't read it or considers even looking at the word "vampire" to be a sin against our Lord and Saviour. I'm being serious here: total G rating, even when considering the one (1) action scene in the entire book. The Rats of NIMH is more gutty and scary than this book. Jane Eyre has far, far more unbridled animal passion that this book, in which the passion is so very thoroughly bridled that it gives pony rides at a petting zoo.
The second thing you ought to know is that it's a 500-page novel, and only between roughly pages 390 and 460 is there any meaningful conflict, which is necessary to create what we conventionally call a story. Again, I'm being completely serious: there is no dramatic tension whatsoever until the book is almost 80% over.
That said, my biggest complaint is that the main character, our heroine, is utterly blank. There is nothing whatsoever interesting or distinctive about her. She has no talents. She has no hobbies. She has no interests (save a teenage vampire). She has no opinions. She has no curiosity in the world around her. She isn't a terrible person, mind you, just a thoroughly boring one who doesn't really deserve the dignity of a name if she's not going to rise from obscurity at least to the point of having a personal foible or two. We learn two things about her: she smells good to the undead, and she's clumsy. Both of these are far more interesting than anything she does, or any thought that passes through her head.
Complaint number two is that of subplots there are none. You know all those little threads of narrative that get woven together in the end in other, more complicated books, even ones for kids, like Charlotte's Web or Anne of Green Gables or even freaking Ramona the Brave? There aren't any here. There is only the one, single-threaded story, and it is a short story that could have been told inside of eight pages without an additional 490 pages of exasperating and superfluous conversations.
Speaking of conversations, there's actually only one of them between the two main characters, but that doesn't stop them from having it again on four dozen separate occasions. They vary only in the wording of the stubby sentences and when Edward gets unaccountably disgruntled and Bella is "dazzled"/"awestruck"/"fascinated".
World, I have a confession to make: despite having a functional Y chromosome, I do like me a well-written romance quite a bit. It doesn't have to have hot torrid monkeysex or apocalyptic bloodshed, but it does have to have a plot and interesting characters for whom I can feel a little bit of empathy, and this book ain't got them. Insofar as the author seems to have had any goal at all, it's been to write a Vampire Wub Novel that's more suitable for small children than Tom Sawyer or Where the Wild Things Are. Every children's book I adored while growing up is an order of magnitude more subversive than this crap, and I'm honestly a little sad for kids today that this is being offered to them with a straight face as a thrilling read. It isn't. There's no forbidden fruit here, just a graham cracker designed to get you to stop touching yourself.
(Postscript: I was not surprised in the slightest to learn that the author is a graduate of BYU.)