"TWILIGHT SAGA" BY STEPHENIE MEYER

i have a confession... i read the Twilight Saga... t-w-i-c-e...

let me defend myself, here, now, to you: it was a saturday in august, in milano, i was bored, the city was dead, all my friends were on holiday and the temperature was averaging 38C. i decided to cool down at the conveniently local air-conditioned Feltrinelli's, an italian version of la Fnac, where it turns out they have an english language book section. i saw they had the Twilight books and decided i may as well start reading one there & then, giving me an excuse to linger in the shop's coolness a while longer... i was hooked! i bought all four books and cycled home, not surfacing for the rest of the weekend - i read all 4 books that week.

now, i know these books are directed at teenage girls (i'm 30) but i found them fascinating.

1. i love vampires, always have. when i was a teen, i was mad for the Anne Rice vampire novels and a lot of my teen girl's lust was inspired by the vampire Lestat, star of the Rice novels.
2. i was healing a broken heart thus the passionate and uninhibited romance & devotion experienced by the protagonists (Bella Swan & Edward Cullen) of the Saga, revived a lot of what had been slowly been molding away...
3. as a result, i could relate to Bella & Eward's break-up in book two, eg. quote by Bella:"It was like someone had died - like I had died. Because it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family - the whole life that I'd chosen..." as an only child with divorced parents and an estranged family, i could really relate to how Bella had hoped to part of the Cullen family in all ways possible.

i felt the books got me through my lonely, hot, moustique infested August 2009, they helped me say goodbye to my sadness, move on from my ex-love and hope for something/someone better. i know that may sound INSANE to y'all, but it was fulfilling my need of evasion, helping me come to some conclusions i needed to move forward. like all artistic expression, i believe the viewer/reader/admirer/listener is in his/her power to take away what he/she wishes - i have an open and boundary-free imagination (being an only-child, i've had plenty lonely hours developing that...), and can dive into the world of fantasy, taking from it what i can.

so there it is, my confession: i loved the Twilight Saga!