Week 3 - The Mistake

Introduction:

Oh dear, this week's theme is First Love. Not a terribly exciting theme for a manly man like myself, but I do enjoy the occasional tearjerker. Speaking of tearjerkers, we started off this week's class with a rewind on last week's topics, but we also had some time to write down about our very first love and how we felt at that time. As some of us divulged into our love-lives we got to Carlos. I didn't expect anyone to open up this much, but it was quite nice to see someone step up and have the courage to put himself out there like he did. Much respect to him!

First thoughts/impressions:

 

Yep, this week is going to be a fun one. We're hitting Twilight. The massively popular saga about vampires, werewolves and impossible romance was on the list of this week's books and I just had to know what all the fuss was about. Granted, I might not be the target audience Stephanie Meyers had in mind when she wrote Twilight but I figured it would be a nice change to hear a male's perspective on this highly acclaimed book.

Twilight follows the story of 17 year old Bella Swan who has decided to go live with her father after her mother decides to remarry. She goes to school and meets Edward Cullen, the main vampire in this story and they fall hopelessly in love. Edward, who has incredible strength and speed combined with immortality yet he does not possess the basic human control we have when controlling our emotions. Due to the fact Edward is a vampire, the love between him and Bella is one that can never actually happen. They struggle with this throughout the entire book.

I was already hesitant to start reading this book but I decided to put away my preferences and go through it anyway, since I know Stephanie Meyers to be a good storyteller. The story itself is quite okay, when it actually PROGRESSES. My god, this book is so slow due to the copious amounts of empty dialogue between Bella and Edward. The excruciating details with which the writer describes Edward made me feel very uneasy. If only she would move away from all the ridiculous dialogue between Edward and Bella and stop with the detailed description of Edward she could focus more on actually progressing the story at a decent pace.

Age suitability/Theory:

I would definitely not put this book on my list as a recommendation for Youth Literature. I don't feel that this book offers anything special for young adults to read about as they progress through their teenage years. This book is obviously catered towards teenage girls who are in that phase where they obsess about “The perfect man”, which would be Edward in this scenario. Bella is definitely a character who gets lost in her love for Edward, which

appears to be a common phenomenon among teenage girls these days (Laursen & Williams, 1997). So Bella is definitely a relatable character, but not one I would recommend to young girls to look up to and even aspire to be like.

The characters are bland, the plot doesn't progress at a pace which makes it easy to read, the setting is okay (if you like vampires/werewolves), the theme is mostly love, or impossible love but if I want these children to read a book themed with love this is not the book I would recommend. Perhaps one of the more redeemable qualities in this book is that the overarching themes are very good for their target audience. “Teens see the world and interpret it intensely. They feel deep longing and pain and love and searching. Understanding these qualities about adolescence will make your literature for these readers richer and deeper.” (Rachel Scheller, 2012) The themes of meaningful choices, love, fear and good vs. Evil are all things that children (especially girls) at that age are all confronted with.

 

In class discussion:

The class discussion this week was fairly limited, but there were some things sparked an interest in the classroom. For instance, when we got to the topic of controversial things in the books that we read for this week, not everyone agreed on what exactly constitutes a "controversial topic". I found it interesting that the common link between these three books that we had the option of reading (Twilight, Forever and Cal) all had some form of age difference that is fairly controversial. Twilight has the 100 year old Edward and the 17 year old Bella. Forever has a lot of sexual content which also takes place between a man and a woman who are different ages in both physical and emotional aspects. Other topics included the insanity scale of our first love and the ones of the characters in the books.

The thing that I found most interesting in this class was the part of the “Divided self”. I’ve always been fascinated by the mind and what it is capable of and R.D. Laing’s theory about the mental illness touches on this significantly. The tension between the two persona’s, the authentic and the false is something that I see all the time (perhaps not in the extreme ways) in daily life and is something that fascinates me as I can never fully understand how that works. I’ve already ordered Laing’s book on Amazon so I can learn a bit more about this.

Interesting theories/information:  

The theories or information about the books is fairly limited compared to the movies but there are some interesting facts about Stephanie Meyer.

- She had no prior writing experience before she wrote Twilight

- She's a Mormon. This inspires a lot of her writing and how she acts

- She named some of her characters after people she knew. For example, Seth, the werewolf, was named after her son.

 

Sources: 

Laursen, B., & Williams, V. (1997). Perceptions of interdependence and closeness in family and peer relationships among adolescents with and without romantic partners.  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

Scheller, R (2012). Writing for the young adult audience. Retrieved on the 11^th of October 2013 from http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/writing-for-the-young-adult-audience