Twilight, Chp 5

In which fingers are pricked, balls are thrown, faints are had, and your blogger wants to slap a vampire.

Another quick one this evening, because I just got back from vacation and I'm really kinda exhausted. Your regularly scheduled snarkery will resume with Lost on Thursday. Anyhoo…..Maybe it's the hangover talking, but I kinda sorta maybe didn't despise the chapter. There're still a shit-ton of problems, which we'll get to in due course, but there's a tiny bit of course-correction to be glimpsed under the rampant misogyny and shitty writing.

My biggest issue with the current state of "YA" literature is that the teenage leads are so rarely allowed to just relax and be teenagers. There's always a revolution to lead, an apocalypse to avert, various evil wizards in need of smiting. Kids quickly forget to be kids, grow up fast, and turn into super-serious short adults declaiming in expository fashion about the state of the world. Look at the descriptions of Harry Potter by the end of book seven. "Haunted… Weary…. Solemn…." Poor Harry isn't alone, mostly because every YA author ever has imitated his series.

If Stephanie Meyer has done anything right, and I'm not saying she has, it's in choosing to make the stakes of this book so refreshingly low. We're looking at a story about two kids who want to bone, and may or may not get around to doing that in these pages (Ed: I know they hook up eventually, not sure of the book). Now, I'm not saying this isn't an important, life-shaping decision. It's strongly implied, if never outright stated, that Bella is a virgin. Edward seems to have designs on changing that, and doing it in the most woman-hating, choice-robbing fashion possible short of outright rape. So yeah, this is a huge moment for Bella, but it's only about her and that makes the book wonderfully personal. Wait, wonderfully? Ok, that may be stretching things.

But still, this is the first chapter where Bella feels human. She's witty, sarcastic, insecure, and generally teenaged. Edward is still a raging asshole,  but at least he feels like the kind of asshole we all hated in highschool. I still don't buy for a second that these two have some kind of pre-destined connection, but we're getting pointed in a direction that might, possibly, lead me to think they could have coffee in the same zip code without me wanting to papercut myself to death. This is progress! In other news, Edward still sucks, Stephenie Meyer is still determined to make every feminist in the country burn her in effigy, and the bizarrely negative treatment of every supporting character continues apace. So, yeah. See Y'all Thursday for Lost! Peace!