Vampire Love by Libby Gruner, an essay at Literary Mama on the sources for the popularity of Stephanie Meyer’s series:

Vampire stories are, of course, perfect for teenagers. Vampires stay out all night, scare the respectable citizens, take crazy risks, and live, seemingly, forever. And they’re both sexy and dangerous. Their feasting is intimate, and it’s transformative: the first time matters. Vampire stories come and go, but they’ve been particularly popular among teenagers, it seems to me, during the age of AIDS: they titillate with their suggestion of a sweet fatality borne in the blood, but they also — in the Twilight series especially — carry a strong message of abstinence.”

I read Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse last month, one after the other, like candy, in the course of two or three days. Two of my daughters had the books, purchased with their own money, and I read them mostly to see what the fuss was about. Just like candy, I found them fairly harmless, but not terribly nutritious. Eldest Daughter read the first book in the series, Twilight, and found it to be repetitive and somewhat emotionally overwrought. I couldn’t disagree with her assessment, but it didn’t bother me as much as it did her. I just kept reading, eager to find out how Bella and her vampire boy friend would resolve their essential, life-threatening dilemma: how do you love someone who’s seriously tempted to kill you and drink your blood every time he gets close to you? Or if you’re Edward the Reformed Vampire who’s made a promise not to drink human blood, even though he needs blood to survive and craves human blood, how do you have an intimate relationship with the love of your life without killing her?

There are, of course, other difficulties and plot predicaments: bad, unreformed vampires, werewolves in the second book, Bella’s own clumsiness and stubbornness, Edward’s rectitude and his family of good, but tempted, vampires, a sort of Vampire Capital of the World where the vampires are bloodthirsty and not afraid to show it., other guys who provoke Edward’s jealousy. Still, it all comes down to: how are Edward and Bella going to get together and survive the encounter?

Recommended, cautiously, for those young ladies who realize that these books are fantasy, not reality, and that they’re essentially light reading, not models for male/female relationships.

I put Unwind on my list of Dystopian Novels with Pro-Life Themes along with The Declaration by Gemma Malley and Children of Men by P.D. James. I had only read a synopsis of the novel but it sounded as if it might belong on that list.

Now I think it’s a little more, and a little less, complicated, than the title to such a list would imply. The author, Neal Shusterman, tries to straddle the line between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” arguments all the way through the novel to very end. Toward the end of the story, one of the characters preaches to an audience of Unwinds, teenagers slated for death by dismemberment for the benefit of those in need of an organ transplant:

“I don’t know what happens to our consciousness when we’re unwound. I don’t even know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this. We have a right to our lives! We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies! We deserve a world where both those things are possible—and it’s our job to help make that world.”

Those words echo both sides of the abortion debate quite faithfully.

The world that Shusterman creates is a compelling one. To end the Heartland War between the Life Army and the Choice Brigade, the Bill of Life is conceived and signed. It says that “human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child . . . on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t ‘technically’ end. The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called ‘unwinding.'” You can see the possibilities in such a set up: possibilities for exploring both pro-life and pro-choice arguments and weaknesses. And Shusterman does explore. He raises questions such as:

What happens to unwanted babies when no abortions are allowed? (I think his scenario in this case is rather weak and unlikely since the sort of thing he portrays didn’t happen much before abortion was legal in the first place.)

Is it better to die or to be “donated” in pieces to those who are in need of new body parts?

What is a soul, and when does a human become a living soul?

What happens to that soul or consciousness or life when you die?

What if you don’t die but rather your organs, even your brain, could live on in other bodies? Then, what happens to You? Are you really still alive?

Is every person truly valuable? What about fetuses? What about criminals and delinquents? Are you still valuable even if no one assigns value to you, if no one loves you?

Is suicide terrorism ever justified?

The answers to these questions in the novel are ambiguous, and the reader can read a lot of his own prejudices into the story and find support for whatever point of view he brings to the reading in the first place. Or one can take the novel’s questions as food for thought and come away with some awareness of or even appreciation for “the other side” of the abortion debate.

I came away with a renewed commitment to life and the sacredness of life at all stages from conception to death. But I did catch a glimpse of what fears the pro-choice people are harboring and of what a chasm there is between the worldview of a pro-life activist and that of an abortion defender.

And I did think Mr. Shusterman should be commended for writing a fine story.

Clay Gardner and Joey Chancey are best friends, even they’re as different as the proverbial night and day. Clay is poor. Joey is rich, or at least upper middle class. Clay works at the hospital to earn a little money to keep heart and soul together; Joey has no job but a very active social life. Clay’s family consists of a dead mother, a distant and cold father, and a sister who’s busy builiding her own life in another state. Joey has a close and loving family. Clay wants to become a doctor, but doesn’t have the money to even enter college in the fall. Joey, the class valedictorian and football hero, is planning to go to Duke in the fall.

When Clay gets off work and finds Joey in their clubhouse, naked and wielding a weapon with intent to do bodily harm to Clay or anybody else who gets close, he can hardly believe it’s happening. But it does happen, and Clay must find out what’s wrong with Joey, how he changed from a competent, ambitious, friendly high school graduate to a psychotic mess on the critical list at the hospital. And everyone thinks it’s Clay’s fault somehow. It all makes for a great mystery with a message that’s never preachy or heavy-handed.

Surprisingly, author S.A. Harazin is a woman. I found this fact surprising because Blood Brothers is such a very male book. The narrator and protagonist, Clay, is a guy. His thoughts are guy thoughts. I don’t know how Ms. Harazin made me feel as if I’d climbed inside a male brain when I read this book, but she did. And that’s some accomplishment for a “chick”.

Also, Ms. Harazin’s background and experience in nursing shows. Having spent a lot of time in emergency rooms myself lately (with my parents), I recognize some of the atmosphere that pervades Clay’s workplace. And I figure the author gets the details and the ambience right since some of it feels so familiar.

Some violence and crude language, but not too overpowering. Good for young adult girls. Great for young adult guys.

One of the main characters in Cliff McNish’s YA novel, Angel is Stephanie Rice, the socially backward homeschooled daughter of strict parents who have not until recently allowed her to have friends or significantly interact with the outside world. Stephanie wears the wrong clothes to her new school, talks about the wrong subjects, and tries way too hard to make friends. If it sounds like a bad stereotype, it is, but Stephanie does have one thing that distinguishes her from all those other formerly homeschooled social disasters out there: she’s obsessed with angels.

Freya, the other main character in the book, is also an angel-addict, but she’s faced her mentally ill fascination with becoming an angel, overcome it, been healed and been released from the mental hospital. So Freya doesn’t believe in angels anymore. However, she keeps on seeing them, especially one dark angel who scares the heck out of her.

McNish’s angels are certainly not Biblical angels. The angels in this books are more like alien beings from another part of the universe, who, having compassion on poor humans on Earth, try to do what they can to alleviate human suffering. Unfortunately, these angels are limited beings, also limited in number, and with no access to a Living God. According to the book, some angels believe in God and others don’t, just like humans in that respect. So, the angels in Angel aren’t really angels at all, not messengers of God, not beings created by a loving God to praise and worship Him, not “holy ones” set apart to the service of God. Author Cliff McNish just uses the word “angel” and then makes up his own fantastical beings who have very little in common with the angels in the Bible. I wish he had called them almost anything else, maybe gods, although they’re beautiful but essentially impotent gods.

Another problem I had with the novel: the human characters behave rather oddly, even the ones who are supposed to be sane. A father leaves his daughter alone in the house for two days just as he is considering committing her to a mental institution because he believes she’s relapsed into mental illness. Huh?
A mom locks her erratically behaving daughter in a bedroom and then leaves to pick up her husband, the girl’s dad, from work, leaving the girl locked up with the makings of a bonfire in the room. Huh?
A teacher allows a discussion in which most of the class is ganging up on and tormenting a new student in her classroom to go on for a very long time. Why?
Such anomalies abound.

Then, there are sentences like this one: “Freya was just using that as an excuse to keep him with her and talk to her.” (p. 310)

And this one: “An unaccountable need to defend herself was racing through her blood.” Adrenaline?

I found Angel absorbing in some ways, but unsatisfying in the end. I kept hoping that some of the characterization issues would be resolved, that the peculiarities of the the characters’ behaviors would turn out to have rational explanations. But they didn’t. Only New Age, irrational explanations that were ultimately unconvincing.

Not my cup of tea, but thanks to Lerner for sending me a review copy.