Twilight... the big craze right now!

So... my son came home from school a few weeks ago and mentioned this 'Twilight' movie that was out. He told me the 'just' of the movie and my first reaction to it was 'yikes!' that doesn't sound very good. He said it was about a human girl falling in love with a vampire. I have never liked the idea of vampires - my oldest sister used to pretend she was a vampire and come after me and I would cry and it would usually end up getting her in trouble from Mom and Dad. She loved it! Mean old sister - right Kathy???? I think we watched an old vampire movie and this made her pick on me.
Anyway to my point... Ben said that all the girls in his class had seen the movie and have read the books - I thought, 'wow, they are only 11 years old and are into vampires?' It bothered me for some reason (probably from my childhood fears). I also didn't like the idea that if the movie romantisized vampires it might influence kids to try and be like vampires or go 'goth' etc. I decided to check it out on my own. I went to the movie...
The movie was very well done, not scary like the older vampire movies I had seen. In fact the main 'Vampire' family in the movie were 'good', they only went after animals instead of humans. They had trained themselves to not give into their natural instincts to go after human blood. The relationship between Bella (the human) and Edward (the vampire) was very intense as their love for one another seemed to develop over night and was deeper than a crush... it was as though they were 'soul-mates'. Edward's family accepted Bella at once (besides Rosalie who didn't like the idea much) and that was very sweet. The bond between each member of their family was real and true unlike many of human family members in our world, and Bella's.
After seeing the movie I decided to read the book and I must warn you that the book is even more intense than the movie! It is over 600 pages long full of descriptions of every deep emotion that passes between each character. The book starts off with a quote from Genesis which I found very pleasing to me. It was regarding temptation.
In fact as you see above the cover for the book has a girls hands holding an apple... how interesting. It does make sense in the book as tempation is seen from all different angles.
I will not let my boys read the series until they are old enough to understand such deep emotions described in these books. I think it would just confuse them. There are many things in the series that come up that a mature mind can work through and digest - however, a younger mind may take to mean something else and romantasize where they really shouldn't go.
Overall I have enjoyed reading the series and look forward to seeing the sequel to Twilight on the big screen.
God bless you and have a merry Christmas everyone!
Kelly