Reading Matters …

By Brad Neff
If you might be shopping soon for a teenage daughter, niece, or granddaughter, you might want to consider buying one or more of the Twilight series, a teenage fantasy set of books by Stephenie Meyer.
I think that Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn are good books. I think so because I’ve read them. I enjoyed them. (Some parents might want to pass on Breaking Dawn. Its content is a little more mature in nature. I’ve read it, and the rest, because I read a huge amount of children’s and young adult literature. If my kids might like a book or a series, I try to read the book or the series.) It’s easy to get wrapped up in these stories.
Yes, the books do involve a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. Yes, the stories can get exceptionally melodramatic. Unlike most vampire fiction, however, the books are well-written. They are full of suspense, humor, twists, and turns.
Why buy the books when you could show your daughter or relative the movie?
Well, Rahina Noor, one of my students has a good answer for this question. She believes that the movie usually leaves out far more than you think. Movies based on books have to take out parts because the parts either don’t fit or aren’t possible.
Sometimes, those are the parts of the story that make the story interesting.
“The book has all the details,” she would say, “the best details.”
(Brad Neff is a media specialist with the Hamtramck Public Schools.)