Saturday 14 November 2009

'I do not drink ... unleaded'

The second Twilight film is released this Friday and the excitement is mounting, apparently. Not seen the first one and don’t intend to see this one either but I did have a go at reading the first of the books. I only got a few pages in before giving up which may be because as a 45 year old man I’m about as far away from the target readership as it’s possible to get. But that didn't seem to be it. No, as far as I was concerned my problem was suspension of disbelief. Oh, not that the pale and rather dishy boy at the back was a vampire, that didn’t bother me. I grew up with Hammer films. No, it was the fact that the heroine’s estranged father tried to win her affection by giving her a truck which she then drove to school. For some reason this did my head in. Oh it’s not that she’s a girl, my head would have been just as done in if it had been a boy who drove a truck to school. No, it was the truck. I was once a teenager, there are teenagers within my family and I have worked with teenagers and never once would I have considered giving any of them a truck. A moped, motorbike, car even if I had the funds, maybe. But not a truck. It just never occurred to me in the same way that it never occurred to me to give them a hovercraft or a Bren carrier (with the Bren gun de-activated of course, I’m not completely irresponsible) or an aardvark.

Anyway, so there it was. I’m trying to read this bestselling book and all the time I’m thinking ‘she’s driving a truck for crying out loud, to school’ and in the end had to return it from whence it came and move onto something else. Personally I think Ms Meyer missed an opportunity here. Vampires are popping up everywhere but truck driving teenagers are rare. The Teenager Who Drove A Truck To School. Now there’s a book I could read.

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