In 2008, I wrote a defense of Twilight for Guernica Daily. In my defense, I hadn’t read the books at the time, and only the first film had been released. While I won’t renounce my original point (that the books tapped into something teenage girls were lacking in their entertainment choices, i.e. romance over sex), holy moly do I regret anything that may have sounded like endorsement. In the final book of the trilogy, eighteen-year-old Bella Swan skips college because she gets married and knocked up. Would that I were making this up.

Thank the YA gods that a protagonist much more akin to Buffy than Victim #37 has taken center stage with Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. (Yes, I’ve read them; I learned my lesson.) Katniss Evergreen is a bow-wielding, family-saving hero of the first order. Oh, and the movie looks like terrific fun.

Photograph via Flickr by emilyonasunday.

 

 

Erica Wright

Erica Wright is the author of the poetry collections All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned and Instructions for Killing the Jackal. She is the poetry editor at Guernica magazine as well as an editorial board member of Alice James Books. Her latest novel is The Granite Moth: A Novel.

At Guernica, we’ve spent the last 15 years producing uncompromising journalism.

More than 80% of our finances come from readers like you. And we’re constantly working to produce a magazine that deserves you—a magazine that is a platform for ideas fostering justice, equality, and civic action.

If you value Guernica’s role in this era of obfuscation, please donate.

Help us stay in the fight by giving here.