Reasons Why Twilight Is A Big Steaming Pile, Part II
Let me start this post by saying that I did not actually finish the book. I got to about page 300, and I just couldn't bear it anymore, it was that boring. I did, however, skip ahead to about page 400, when the heroine is in danger yet again and he saves her life, again, and then to the end of the book, when absolutely nothing has changed. Here are my final thoughts:

-In addition to the multiple times the vampire boyfriend physically overpowers her over her "protests," she takes to curling up in his lap "like a child," he carries her or strokes her hair or whatever "like a child" many times. Creepy and paternalistic.

-The tired old vampire-biting-as-sex metaphor gets teened up in tired old ways as well. The main character is always fretting about not "making it harder for him" and he's always talking about how scared she should be that he might "lose control." She asks him if they'd ever be able to actually do it, and he (of course the decider about such things) says no because he thinks he might lose control so much that he could "crush her skull" in a moment of passion. She repeatedly says that she knows she should be more afraid of him than she is, since its only his willpower that keeps him from "destroying" her, and he often seems irritated with her that she isn't more afraid of him.

Thematic elements aside, the writing is just crap. M. told me she thinks it captures the mindset of a teenage girl really well, but I think it just reads like it was written by a tweenybopper.

-The narrator loses her shit every. time. she sees him, fawning over the way his shirt clings to his "finely muscled chest," etc. My favorite excerpt in this vein: "No angel could have been more glorious."
-The vampire "chuckled," the narrator "scowled," and one of them "grimaced" on nearly every page. You think I'm kidding.

And worst of all:

-There is no sub-plot. None. By page 300, the whole thing was about how fucking hot this vampire is, and how unworthy she feels to be with him, and how tormented he is because he wants to "kill" her, and on and on and on, page after breathless page. There are other characters, but they are mostly Other Boys Who Like Her and The Girls Who Don't Like Her Because Of That. It seemed like around page 400 another vampire appears who wants to kill her, but I consider that only part of the main plot because it is just more of the narrator sacrificing herself and the vampire boyfriend coming to the rescue.

To sum up, this is nothing more than a cut-rate romance novel written by your Mormon neighbor's sexually frustrated, self-loathing 12 year old. And I'm out.  ¶ 11:35 AM