Breaking Dawn (and the rest of the series I had to reread in preparation)

All right. I've endured a lot of flack for reading Breaking Dawn and the rest of the Twilight saga quickly and obsessively and for being the only person remotely close to 30 at the midnight selling. And I'm a little embarrassed about it. At our neighborhood picnic two nights before it came out, six people came up to me and said, "Oh, I heard you're obsessed with Twilight." Granted, all they wanted to do was bond because they liked the books too, but I wanted to scream, "Do you know how many books I've read since I read Twilight? Like, a lot. And I just finished a Pulitzer Prize winner this week." I think there's a line in Hamlet about she who protests too much.

I'll defend to the death Meyer's creativity and characters, characters that stick with you after you read the books. I'm sure the romance is partly why it's so addictive. I'll admit that. So I like romance. But apparently only in my head; poor Tyler has to deal with someone who teases him anytime he tries to be romantic.

My objective thoughts on this book: Meyer's creativity went into a higher gear in this story, surprising me many times with things I hadn't considered at all as a possibility for this story. That was entertaining and kept me interested for the entire book. The characters that I loved so well in the other three books seemed to suffer a bit because of it. Not that they changed illogically; in fact because of her creative "plot elements" I bought all of the changes that characters underwent, but now there were so many characters that were so vitally different than they were before that I lost track a bit of the characters that had kept me up at night before. Maybe this doesn't make any sense; I think I need to talk more specifically so here's a big SPOILER ALERT. Bella whose entire character had been built around the choice to love Edward, recognizing the sacrifices that entailed, becomes a mother. Now I have felt that love for Tyler where I would sacrifice most anything for him, and I have felt that expand and change focus when Talmage came into my life, so I understood how it affected Bella, but maybe because we weren't always focused on Bella for this story, she just became a different character for me. Edward, whose identity was so defined by being protective of Bella, doesn't need to be protective anymore when she becomes "more durable." So he lost a major part of his identity as well. Jacob who we only knew as the other man who loved Bella, imprints on another character and looses that part of his identity as well. Again, even though the changes weren't illogical, they were changes and I missed the characters I had loved before.

Interesting that Meyer talks about how much she admires Orson Scott Card, because my reaction was just the same with the Ender series. I love Ender's Game largely because I fell in love with the character who became so real to me and I continued and read everything else Card wrote about Ender, but by Xenocide, I felt there were so many characters in the story that I lost track of Ender. While Xenocide (and Breaking Dawn, too) was a more intellectually interesting and more complicated story, I loved the simplicity of the first in the stories for the personal connection to characters I developed.

All in all, I liked Breaking Dawn, but I think Eclipse will remain my favorite in the series. I felt like it built around a singular theme and brought me with the characters through their growth and epiphanies.

Last thought for why I admire Stephenie Meyer and the niche she has created in teen fiction: these books are fraught with sexuality. I think the whole vampire genre is--creatures who carnally lust for blood have to be equated with the most powerful carnal desire in humanity. So Meyer's entire series (with vampires who routinely master that desire for blood) becomes a morality tale about self-control. And I don't think there are many books touting that message, teaching a laurel lesson about waiting to gratify that urge until marriage to girls who don't receive laurel lessons. Granted, I think girls should probably be laurel age to read them rather than beehive age, but at least the conversation's out there.