Why 'Twilight' isn't for everybody

When a tide of popularity rises, it erases all boundaries. The first sign that "Twilight" was a pop-culture phenomenon was that teen girls who hadn't talked to their parents in years were dressing up with their mothers in vampire costumes and attending midnight book parties together. By last summer, when the marketing for the fourth and ostensibly final book in the series reached the proportions of hysteria (and that was a mild dress rehearsal for the movie release), it had become de rigueur for any self-respecting female reader of any age to read the books. Not only to read them, but to swoon over them, to be overwhelmed by them; to find, as 10-year-old Lyla Polon of Santa Monica wrote, "It's hard for me to face the fact that [the characters] are not real."

By Sonja Bolle

December 14, 2008