Twilight by Stephanie Meyer ***

I know, I know. I've jumped on the teenage-girl bandwagon & read the book that all females under 18 have read about 5 times & seen the movie about 6 times & talk about with their friends on a constant basis. And it's pretty good.

If you haven't heard of this series of teenage vampire books yet, you may need to look around you & see if your home is indeed under a large slab of granite. Geared toward teenage girls & all they crave, Twilight is one of those books you don't want to like, but you do. As a 38 year old woman who's been married for almost 15 years, some of the sappy romantic lines made me roll my eyes, but the tension between the 2 main characters is great. Edward is a vampire, & Bella isn't. So she's always running the risk of him getting a wild hair up his ass & eating her. Yep, it's a little different.

Reading this book was like time travel for me, not because my high school years were anything like what the characters experience (HA! Not only did I not date any vampires while in high school, I didn't date any humans either!), but because of reading vampire books. Interview with the Vampire was out in paperback, & my best friend loaned me hers after she finished it. Soon we were both on to The Vampire Lestat & then Queen of the Damned. That's as far as I got in the series, though my friend read every last one. But I so much remember talking with her about every little detail of those books, all those years ago: who should play Lestat if they made a movie? how could they actually get a child to play Claudia? was Lestat really so bad?

Those were the days!