The Oregonian is Getting Bombarded by Twilight Fans Right About... NOW

This morning on page 6 of the A & E sectioin of the paper, Nestor Ramos wrote a "trailer of the week" review of Twilight, in theaters November 21st, and he's going to be hearing from readers, tons of them. Not because he said, "It looks awful," because he's allowed an opinion (though as a non-adolescent girl, what would he know about it?), but because he didn't even get his facts straight about the plot--"a teenager who moves to a somewhat dreary Pacific Northwest town with her mom and falls madly in love with a vampire."

She moves in with her dad, leaving behind a mom, but the falling in love madly is right. Everyone knows that.

I didn't know much until this summer, when coincidentally I planned our family camping vacation for the wettest spot in the lower 48, Forks, Washington, the setting of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, shortly after our daughter finished book number four. I'd recommended the books to her after Barnes & Nobles employees gushed about them and wrote down the names and author on scraps of paper for me at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference the previous summer, but hadn't paid much attention to the details as our daughter swallowed them whole. I had no idea of the name of the town the heroine, Bella Swan, moves to.

Our daughter couldn't believe we were going to Forks.

She is not a gushing girl, but she was persuasive in her intention that I should read Twilight when we were there, so that I would understand. So we searched the town littered with mentions of the book, the characters, the series that put the town on the literary and tourist map, for a copy of book number one, since she didn't have it on her. Being a non-stop mystery reader for the last twenty-something years, I didn't have high expectations of this seemingly adolescent read.

But I was up until 2:30 am the night I started reading it, and was done just before reaching our house on the return journey. Damn. Tittilating, romantic and way too reminiscent of that teenage summer I read Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Awakening back-to-back, followed by a fall devouring Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The ultimate bad boy with the ultimate sacrificial lamb, but he didn't eat her! Wow. No wonder there are legions of "Twilight moms" who love the books as well.

Our daughter wants me to read the other books, but I'm holding out until after November 21st, when we have a girl date to watch Twilight and eat candy together (and the reviewer is right when he says about Robert Pattinson, the actor playing Edward, "just look at the kid"--when he played Cedric in the fourth Harry Potter film I kept saying, "My god he's good looking" until my kids were sick of hearing it). Sometimes we just watch the Twilight trailers for a good time.

So despite what Nestor Ramos wrote for the Oregonian, "it's probably not for you; it's certainly not for us; but it's for somebody," it is for us, and I can't wait.