There's a lot to be said for it encouraging them to go out and find more books, too. When I briefly worked at a bookstore two years ago, the teen girls who came in couldn't get enough -- Twilight had whetted their appetite, and they were eager for anything even remotely like it.
When I worked at the bookstore it was the Harry Potter series that was doing this. The kids had read everything that had been written in the series up to that point, and they wanted anything they could get that was similar.
I think Harry Potter was responsible for a broader sample of people of all ages reading again, though.
Twilight
was pretty strictly teen girls (and their moms, although I think those moms were probably already romance readers).
Anything that gets anyone to read more is a good thing, which is why I hate when I hear parents in a bookstore telling their kids they can only read "good books", they should be working with their kid's interests, not against them.
I have never read any Gabaldon, but I may have to look into downloading one to my kindle. Is Outlander the first book in the series?
Has anyone read Masques or Wolfsbane by Patricia Briggs? Masques is her first published book that has recently been reprinted after being out of print for a while and Wolfsbane is the sequel that was just published for the first time. I recently finished the first and I am currently reading the second. I love them. I think I like Aralorn (the main character) as much as Mercy.
For all my scorn for the Twilight series, I have told Abby if she's interested in reading it, I will be more than happy to get her the books or take her to the library. So far, she's not shown any interest in it—mostly because the girls at her school who've read it and rave over it, rattle on at length about Team Jacob versus Team Edward, ad nauseum, and it drives her batty. She also said that Bella sounds like (in her words) a total drip.
She has read Alyxandra Harvey's Drake Chronicles and loves them, so she's definitely not anti-vampire.
Outlander is the first one.
I admit that, as much as I enjoyed the first one, I got bored by book 3 (that's the one where they go to America?) and gave up entirely when
the boyfriend was mistaken for a rapist and Jamie arranged for him to be captured by Indians
for a variety of reasons. Too much authorial puppetry for me.
Also, and I know this is blasphemy, but like J.D. Robb's stuff, there was too much sex. I got bored and started skimming.
All I know of Gabaldon is that she loathes fanficcers and based Jaime on a Doctor Who companion.
All I know of Gabaldon is that she loathes fanficcers and based Jaime on a Doctor Who companion.
Well, to be fair, if I had a fanficcer come up to me at a signing, tell me what I'd done wrong in my work and that their work, based on my creation was better and that they'd fixed the "mistakes," I probably wouldn't be too predisposed to care for them either.
(And this has happened to her more than once. Along with the fanficcers who tell her they fixed her work and could she introduce them to her agent and/or publisher.)
I have to say I was completely immune to alleged addictiveness of Twilight. I forced myself to read the first 75 pages (I was assigned it for book club at work) and gave up. I hate first-person narrators, and first-person annoyingly drippy teenaged girl narrators, especially.
