Twilight, twilight, in the end

This week has been rough. One of the lesser loved weeks in my grand 2008. It began with a death in the family and seems now to have ended with a death in the family (of sorts). I've been maintaining level with Hem, and actually, have finished. The True Post continues to gather strength in my head, but until then, I give you:

"Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer

(read in the hours of 11am and 12:30am, dates August 9 -10)

If you're looking for candy, I've got the hard stuff right here. Check out my 13 hour reading marathon, in which I watched Michael Phelps torpedo his way to win after win after win, and supplemented the repeat commercial interruptions with intense, racing reading of this young adult angst fest.

Now, if you know me, you know that i love, LOVE, the YA Fiction. Can't get enough of it. When it's done well, it gives you a nice clear picture of life and the hard choices we all have to make at some point. And even when it's done poorly, you've probably only spent a weekend reading and so don't feel as though you've wasted much time.

Twilight falls somewhere in between. I didn't spend long on the 300+ pages, and so I feel like I've come out on top. A bit of a belly ache however, as the teenage love drama was so intense at times, I texted Jones about midway through, "I feel as though I'm actively reliving my 16 year old romance to my first love, the painter/musician." Regardless, Twilight was everything I was looking for in a novel that lazy and emotionally wrung Saturday afternoon.

We meet Bella, short for Isabella, early in the novel as an awkward yet engaging 17 yr old who is moving to the Pacific Northwest, land of green and moist and unsurprisingly, vampires. We follow her to high school, listen half heartedly to all of the troubles that attend a new student, and then, speaking as a female who cannot get enough of the star crossed lovers, engage rapturously when she falls in love with the brilliant and dynamic Edward Cullen, a 17 year old with dazzling topaz eyes and burnished golden hair.

The novel moves slowly through their romance, then speeds up into the necessary difficulties of teenage love, and finally, in a whirlwind climax, hurls you through a cataclysmic ending with the promise of more to come. Three more books to come, in fact, as well as a Major Motion Picture.

I'll be interested to see who plays Edward, seeing as Ms. Meyers has written him in the exact form and character as Adonis. Until then, I will probably go pick up the next three books in the quad-rilogy, and suggest that if you have a lazy emotional Saturday coming up, you do the same.