Sakyadhita BooKMarKs

Although I am homeschooled, and have been all my life, as a sixteen-year-old girl I am not entirely segregated from popular culture. I might be less likely than your average teenager to “go with the flow”, but that doesn’t mean I don’t *know* when Miley Cyrus does something even more scandalous than last time, or Justin Bieber tops the charts for the second week running, or a series of poorly-written vampire romance novels by a Mormon author becomes an overnight phenomenon. And… well, what a coincidence. Those same novels are exactly what I sat down to write about.

I remember my first-ever exposure to the Twilight series. I was walking down one of those ritzy red-flagstoned pavements outside some row of enormous stores, and I saw the cover of Breaking Dawn on a six-foot-high poster in the window of a brightly-lit bookstore. I remember noting the title and the name of the author and the odd picture of the red and white chess-pieces on the front before walking on. That must have been just before the series took off, because I had never seen or heard of it before, and it was some months until I saw one of the covers again. Now, perhaps two years later, perhaps a little more, I doubt if there’s one teenaged girl in the entire country who isn’t familiar with the black and red covers of the Twilight series; and most of them have read the books inside the covers too. And so have their mothers; and their aunts; and their fifth cousins twice removed. The Twilight series has taken an almost unprecedented hold over the female population of this country, and I fear that the result, in the emotional baggage these women and girls are going to carry, already is and will continue to be astronomical.

In brief, the series relates the first-person tale of a seventeen-year-old girl who relocates to a small town and falls for a pale, mysterious guy who, though he attends her high school, is soon revealed to be a 108-year-old vampire. Bella, our narrator, is quickly enmeshed in a rom