I'm partway through Breaking Dawn and I want to establish something: I was looking forward to hating these books. But fate has tossed me a curve. At most, I was expecting that the books would be enjoyable despite being poorly written, but even on a technical level, they are just not that bad.

Okay, so maybe Twilight itself sucks. A book that doesn't get good until three-hundred-odd pages in is not a good book. Period. However, the sequels just don't have that problem. 1. I'm enjoying them; can't put them down. 2. They are, for the most part, reasonably well-written. These are not bad books. They are good books with moments of bad, such as the stupid name that Bella gives her kid, what happens to Jacob, Edward's I-am-emo-hear-me-whine, and that whole thing with sensing relationships being a superpower.

What seems to be going on here is that lot of the concepts are stupid, but the execution is usually passable-to-great. The vampire baby thing is a WTF, but the page-by-page of it makes things more believable. The Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights metaphors are done pretty well. And maybe I'm projecting from what I knew ahead of time, but the development of most of the cast is all right too. The biggest weakness is probably that Bella and Edward could stand to have more personality, and that is a pretty big weakness, but overall, these books do not merit the level of criticism that I've seen them get.

...of course, they don't merit the level of mindless praise, either. No, Bella is not a great role model for our young people, but she's not the anti-Christ of feminism either. Yes, Bella does seem to be made deliberately innocuous so that the reader can sub in her own persona, but my SueDAR has been staying on relatively low blip. Ditto for Edward as the non-threatening female fantasy.

Just to put my words in perspective (and to make sure that the folks who showed up to see me slam something go home with some gore on their raincoats), I would like to point out a few authors who suck more than Stephanie Meyer and yet have managed to dodge the sledgehammer:

Terry Goodkind—I read the first two books of his Sword of Truth series. The characters were appealing and I enjoyed reading about them, but every time he wrote himself into a corner, he'd invent some new magical beast or spell that we'd never heard of before. Plot point ex machina. Even if some of Meyer's concepts, such as the child vampires, seem like afterthoughts, she and her editors at least had the presence of mind to go back and work references to the into the beginning of each book before they were printed up.

George "Sure the R.R. Wasn't My Publicist's Idea" Martin—Some of you may have heard my rant about this author before. This is another case where I enjoyed reading it even though the technique left something to be desired. Martin's biggest problem is that he slathers on the sleaze. I like sex and violence as much as the next person, but there's so much of it in his Song of Ice and Fire that I have to dig through it to get to the story. It's as if he thinks I'm too stupid to pay attention unless someone is getting raped and beaten on every other page. Again, the Twilight books don't have this problem: The violence and what sex there is are directly connected to the plot. This isn't Song's only problem, but I'll sum up that Martin's books are at least nominally written for adults and they managed to insult my intelligence. Meyer's books are at least nominally for written teenagers and they didn't.

David Eddings—Eddings is probably more skilled than Goodkind and Martin. He makes almost none of their mistakes. So why does he deserve to be slammed and parodied? I used to reread his books every year, but looking back, they were pretty bland. He's unoriginal. His characters, though likable, are carbon copies of almost every high fantasy cliche out there ...and that's just sticking to his pre-Redemption of Althalus books. I've heard the later ones are pretty putrid. Something about pink dolphins.

Kevin J. Anderson—This guy doesn't deserve to be on this list, but not for the same reasons as Eddings. He's not good enough to clean Goodkind's pipe or emboss the "R.R." on Martin's business cards. Jedi Search was just your garden-variety bad, but Frank Herbert is doing step aerobics in his grave over what this guy and Brian Herbert did to the Dune universe. A few weeks ago, I saw this guy's new Superman novel and I figured I'd flip it open to see if Anderson had gotten any better since House Atreides made me want to gouge my eyes out with its lame, hackneyed plotlines and repetitive, graceless prose. It took two seconds to find out that he hadn't. Who is this man blackmailing to keep giving him writing jobs and what does he have on them?

EDIT: I am adding Diana Wynne Jones to this list, based solely on Howl's Moving Castle. No, it's not that we need at least one woman to demonstrate equal-opportunity sucking. It's that Howl's Moving Castle has more and more serious story-level flaws than any of the Twilight books do. (Please note that the Miyazaki film of the same name, while awesome, has a very different story from the book and also, SPOILERS.) Yes, HMC has some great moments, great images and a cool and original premise, but the story just doesn't add up at the end. The parts with the poem about a woman true and fair feel really forced and the ending in which it turns out that the schoolteacher is the fire demon is completely unexplained. How did the fire demon manage to disguise itself as human walking around when Calcifer can't even leave his fireplace? She could have cleared that up by giving Calcifer some limited powers of disguise, but the older demon appears to have none of Cal's weaknesses. The Twibooks don't always manage to come full-circle, but Meyer does manage to establish the rules of her universe in a way that gives the story an okay foundation.

EDIT: I am adding Philip Pullman based solely on Northern Lights/The Golden Compass. (Why solely? Because it left me with no desire to read the sequels.) NL/TGC has two big problems that the Twibooks do not: First, it is completely ineffective at achieving its author's expressed purpose. It's supposedly an indictment of organized religion, but there's nothing in the book's actual content that portrays religion as bad. Oh sure, Pullman tells that the Magisterium has "taken over every aspect of life," but we never see religion take any role in any aspect of life. We never see anyone anyone go to church or think in religious ways. (Counterexample: In The Other Boleyn Girl, most of the characters believe that sins cause birth defects.) We can counter (and hope) that Twilight was not written to make a political statement, but then there's the second problem: This is not the only time when Pullman tells what he should have shown. For example, Pullman repeatedly tells us that touching another human being's daimon is taboo, but there's no power behind it. His introduction to the character Lyra has her engaging in street fights with other children. Why not have someone accidentally hit someone else's daimon with a mudball and then show everyone freak out and ostracize the perp? Meyer doesn't just tell us that vampires live by a code of secrecy; she shows Rosalie and the Volturi having aneurysms about it.

EDIT: Adding Piers Anthony and I can't believe it took me this long. People criticize the unhealthy romantic relationships in the Twibooks, but oh God, the ones in Mr. Anthony's novels would make a would make a polyamorous symphorophiliac with a haddock fetish go "Um, what?" To give just one example, the protagonist of the first Xanth book (of which I've read many; they're rich and entertaining) discovers the perfect woman: She's under a spell that makes her transition from stupid to average to smart and back once every lunar month. At the same time, she's transitioning from beautiful to average to ugly and back so that she's smart when she's ugly, average when she's average, etc. The protagonist figures, "This is great! Any man would be intimidated by a woman who's smart and pretty! Also, she looks different every month, so I will have the variety without which any man would get bored." Other books feature middle-aged guys sleeping with underaged girls (there's a lot of that, actually), female characters as temptressy minxes who can't function without a man and don't get me started on the thing with the panties... The fact that I grew up reading Anthony's books is probably why Meyer doesn't set off my freak alarm.