Somebody, please save me ...

New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn
Stephenie Meyer
Little Brown

Okay, I'll admit it. I caved. All of my friends kept going on, and on, and on about the Twilight series. "Give it another chance," they said. "It's sooo good." Um, yeah ... so good that it has taken me more than two weeks to find the motivation to write this post. Good? Are you people insane? I love a schmaltzy romance as well as the next girl, but the blatant anti-feminism almost pushed me over the edge.


For those of you smart enough not to pick up this series, let me give you a quick run down of the plot.

• Girl meets boy.
• Boy turns out to be a vampire and mires girl in all sorts of danger.
• Boy leaves girl (he wants to do the "right" thing) and girl loses her mind with grief and becomes a shell of her old self.
• With the help of her best friend (who turns out to be a werewolf), girls starts to piece her life back together.
• Boy gets into trouble and girl goes to save him which invites more trouble.
• Best friend and boy (sworn enemies because of the whole vampire/werewolf thing) compete for love of girl.
• Boy wins.
• Boy marries girl.
• Girl gets pregnant and the half-human, half-vampire foetus almost kills her.
• To save her life, boy turns girl into a vampire right after she gives birth.
• Girl becomes even more beautiful.
• Incubus baby drinks blood and eats food.
• Best friend imprints on baby girl and complicates the life of his pack.
• Boy, girl and best friend fend off threat from evil, old vampires.
• Everyone is saved and lives happily ever after. Oh barf.
  

I'm willing to give Meyer points for creative use of mythologies. She leverages just enough vampire and Native American lore to make part of the book intriguing to those of us interested in the fantastic. I cannot, however, get over the fact that every story line was resolved and presented to the reader with a pretty little bow. Yes, fairy tales are possible. I just want one where the heroine defines herself and isn't defined by her love of her man or the functions of her body. The entire series gets one drop of blood out of five.

Three Cheers for the Glad Game!

The Prometheus Deception
Robert Ludlum
St. Martins Press

While it is not my normal practice to use this blog as a forum for complaint (it is, after all, a book review site), let me just say that this last year has been pretty hard on me. My dad got sick, I had a terrible car accident, I was homeless for a couple of months, one of my dearest friends passed away unexpectedly, my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my dad has gotten sicker and won't be getting better. If you add the everyday crap to the pile (the occasional bad work days, the on again/off again relationship with my best friend and my growing hate for the 401 around Milton) I should be laid out on a couch somewhere undergoing intensive bouts of psychotherapy. But I'm not. And why is that, you ask? It's because I've found my inner Pollyanna and I'm constantly playing the Glad Game.

Take, for example, the subject of this week's post. I started to "read" the Prometheus Deception with my dad when we went for a drive to distract him from the pain. He's to the point in his illness where he can no longer comfortably read a conventional novel, so I picked up an audio book to see if that would do the trick. It did and he has spent lots of happy hours listening to one of his favourite authors. The fact that I became so engaged in this particular story was an added bonus -- see how this Glad Game works?

Now, about the novel ... Nick Bryson is a retired spook who had spent his entire adult life working for an ultra-clandestine organization called the "Directorate". After a significant period of adjustment, he has finally settled into his new life as a university history professor when he is suddenly pulled back into the game. Someone is trying to establish a global, supra-governmental organization that would threaten the privacy and security of civilization as we know it. It is up to Nick to track the shadowy leaders and bring them down. This novel was choc-a-bloc full of dangerous exploits, exotic locales, beautiful women and terrifying men. I was addicted to the story and could hardly wait for Nick to figure it all out. 2.5 action heroes out of 5.