Ok, I get why the average 11 year old girl is writing EDWARD FOREVER with a strawberry scented neon glitter pen in the margins of her spiral notebooks these days, but what I don’t get is why 30 and 40 year old women are actually making the time, effort and spinach dip to host TWILIGHT Book Club Discussion Groups.

Official Twilight Discussion Topic:  Bella faints at the smell of blood.  If she were to become a vampire, how might this serve as a hindrance? 

Uh.  Seriously? 

(Hey, it’s a vampire-themed book club, so at least there’s a high chance they’ll be serving bloody marys.)

In case you don’t have a computer, television, radio, friend, child, nearby middle school, video store, cinema, library, or book store,  TWILIGHT is a best-selling book/movie series by Stephenie Meyer, all about a teenaged girl named Bella and her vampire boyfriend, Edward.  Over 100 trillion books have been sold already, and before the movie even opened it grossed more than all the ‘Star Wars’, ‘Batmans’, and ‘Shreks’ combined.  All this without any of the characters making it to second base, mind you.

Bella is the new girl at school, and even though she is not particularly smart or pretty or funny or quirky or challenged or interesting in any way, all the boys fall in love with her immediately, and all the girls are jealous of her.  She does drive an old pick up truck, which I think is supposed to give some grooviness to her otherwise dull character.  Oh yeah, and she’s read Jane Austin, which maybe is supposed to make her seem more sophisticated than the rest of her classmates, who’ve probably only seen Jane’s movies.  Edward, on the other hand, is exquisite, beautiful, radiant, angelic (insert all the words from your thesaurus for ‘handsome’), and he drives expensive sports cars, and he can read minds, and he’s smart and romantic and experienced and dark-in-a-sexy-way and sensitive and so so so exquisitely beautiful (if you’re already tired of hearing how exquisitely beautiful he is, don’t bother reading the book) – but no one seems to notice.  They’re so busy turning their noses up at Edward the Exquisite that in all the years he’s lived in Forks, Washington no one’s figured out that he’s a vampire – not until Bella turns up, anyway.  It probably has something to do with the fact that she drives an old pick up truck and has read Jane Austin, but for whatever reason Bella’s special, and it takes her only about 20 minutes to figure out his deepest, darkest 100 year old secret.

Discussion topic:  Temptation is a major theme in TWILIGHT – more accurately, resisting one’s temptations.  How do the characters handle temptation?

Though Edward is an exquisitely beautiful vampire who is exquisitely beautiful, he does have some problems.  For example, he can’t go out into sunlight without becoming even more exquisitely beautiful.  That’s a big one.  (The TWILIGHT book club might make a fun drinking game, at least: every time the words ‘exquisite’ or ‘beautiful’ are read everyone has to take a drink of their bloody marys.)

Oh, yes, and there’s Edward’s other problem, sort of the plot of the story, which is (oh, irony of ironies!) that he could potentially, accidentally-on-purpose kill the thing he loves most in the world (as vampires tend to do) – especially if Bella gets a little too carried away while kissing him (as teenaged girls tend to do).  You see, Bella has this incredibly potent, freesia-scented blood that is such a turn on to vampires that they want to eat her.  (They must find scented candles and Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers irresistible, too).  Now Edward is a vegetarian vampire who doesn’t believe in eating his friends and lovers, so he spends much of the story trying to control his (and her) lust so that he doesn’t ‘accidentally’ eat her while he’s kissing her.  But the wanton Bella has less self-restraint, causing poor Edward to suffer bout after bout of VBS (Vampire Blue-balls Syndrome).  It’s quite a predicament, as you can imagine!

The story goes something like this: (alert: spoilers galore)…

exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely beautiful, kissy-kissy-STOP, exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely beautiful, kissy-kissy-STOP, exquisitely beautiful, let’s play baseball, sniff, snort, run and hide, growl, grrr, ouch, slurp-slurp-STOP, exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely beautiful, prom, kissy-kissy-STOP, exquisitely beautiful, the end.

Get rid of the baseball game and it’s the same plot as the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — except that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was good.  Joss Whedon, the writer of the tv series, as well as some of the books and comics, created a flawed, vulnerable heroine that any woman of any age could relate to and admire.  His plots were thoughtful, his writing witty and fresh, and his characters (whether they were monsters, heros, victims or parents) were people we recognized in ourselves and our world.  It was Buffy’s humanness, not her super-powers, that made her brave, compelling, and strong.  She and the other characters had their weaknesses and made their mistakes, but they were empowered and genuine – characters that boys fantasized about and girls admired and emulated.  Joss Whedon’s monsters were also familiar to us – we remembered them from our own comings of age.  When Buffy lost her virginity to the vampire Angel, and then Angel lost his soul to the mortal Buffy, and then Angel turned evil and started killing goldfish and high school teachers, and then Buffy pierced Angel’s heart with that big sword and sent him to a hell dimension…. we all thought:  been there, done that!  I mean, who hasn’t fallen for a guy we knew was all wrong for us, but who was just so intense and irresistible, and then realized too late that he was a soulless ass, and had to kill him?  (Or at least make numerous 4 a.m. prank calls to his house….)

Discussion Topic:  Edward saves Bella on more than one occasion.  Discuss the different instances.

Bella, on the other hand, is like every other helpless, weak, and inane teen girl in those slasher films – the one who has to get saved by the male lead or get killed by the other male lead.  In the case of Bella, she has to get herself saved over and over and over and over – by the end of the book the girl can’t even dress herself, and like a 5 year old waltzing for the first time with her daddy, has to stand on top of Edward’s shoes to dance at the prom, with him holding her up the whole time.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that Edward’s always lifting her up, putting her here and there, carrying her around like a posable doll, driving her, and bossing her around.  I mean, I get it that she had a leg in a cast for about 5 of the 9000 pages, but did he hide the crutch, or what?  It bothered me how willingly dependent she was on him, more like an untrained puppy than a girlfriend.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he swatted her with a newspaper the next time she started whining to be let outside.   

And how creepy is it that Edward (who’s really just an old man in an exquisitely beautiful boy suit, after all) is stalking Bella through the whole book.  I mean, he’s really stalking her.  He follows her every where.  He listens to the minds of her friends and family to find out what she’s saying to them and what she’s doing and where she’s going.  He watches her while she’s alone in her room, which is just disturbing.  When Angel did that to Buffy (after he turned evil) she went into full ninja slayer mode – and I already told you what happened to him.  But in TWILIGHT the author leads her readers to believe this psyhotic attention is sweet.  It’s supposed to be romantic that Edward has to save Bella from her own clumsiness and  choices, that Edward is obsessed with her scent and comings and goings, that Edward has admitted he might kill her but won’t if they (but mostly, if she) behaves herself and minds her libido, that he can’t stand to not know what she’s thinking at every moment, that he watches her sleep and eat and presumably dress and undress, that he must spend every waking hour near her (and since he doesn’t sleep, that’s a lot of together time), and that their relationship is utterly in his control.  But it isn’t romantic – it’s yucky.  Edward needs a restraining order.  And I don’t care how exquisitely beautiful he is.  It’s bad enough having a boyfriend who’s better looking than you, but a stalker who’s better looking is just confusing and weird.

This book is soooooooooo tedious and predictable (and creepy in a bad way) that I couldn’t put it down.  I kept reading it thinking that with all the hype it’s getting it must have an amazing twist at the end to make up for all the hours I wasted getting there.

But no.

There wasn’t even a punch line.  I know I’m opening my blog up to threatening comments from the Meyer Maniacs, but in my opinion, it was simply and finally a bad book, with a bland story, and insipid characters.  It’s like a harlequin romance for tweens. 

Or is there something I’m just not getting?

Discussion topic:  Once Edward has tasted Bella’s blood, do you think it will make it harder for him to resist Bella?

Oo!  Oo!  Pick me!  I think know the answer!