New Moon Complete Illustrated Movie Companion is available for Preorder Now!
The New Moon Movie Companion is already available for pre-order from Amazon. It will be released on October 6, 2009. That’s over a month before the movie premieres! Can you believe it? Click below to save your copy. I’m sure it will sell out almost immediately!

Is the Twilight book saga appropriate for young girls and tweens? Parents might want to consider this before letting their kids jump onto to the Twilight bandwagon.

The movie Twilight is PG 13 and pretty innocent barring a few kisses with one party being in naught but panties. As a mother of 3 and HUGE Twilight fan I would stick to that age 13 and up guideline though.

The books though are a different ball of wax. The first book, Twilight is pretty innocent as is the second one New Moon. Yes they have some steamy kisses and passionate longing but nothing is acted out. Some parents might still want to be careful exposing kids younger than 13-14 to that type of reading. While the physical relationship in Twilight cannot progress because of the human/vampire conundrum I think that just makes it all the easier for young girls to think about how those barriers do NOT exist in real life.

The third book Eclipse has one of the characters Bella thinking about sex quite a bit, even going as far as trying to shimmy out of her clothes while she and Edward kiss. There is a lot of description about Edward’s rock hard body and perfect face as well. The book has no sex to speak of but there is much longing for sex.. not something I would be anxious for my young daughter to be thinking about. And I like Sonja Bolle’s description of Breaking Dawn:

In the fourth book, by contrast, the lovers have tons of sex. First, they marry, of course, and produce a fetching baby. But the fourth book answers the burning question about what vampires do with all their free time, since they don’t sleep. It turns out that married vampires have a lot of sex. They are immensely strong, so they end up destroying a lot of perfectly lovely beds, and much other furniture to boot. In fact, their lovemaking is so ferocious that one young married vampire couple teases the newlyweds that they can’t be truly crazy for each other, because they haven’t destroyed enough houses yet.

As an adult I thought the sex could have and should been a bit more graphic after that long wait and a little less silly (aka pillow biting). BUT if kids are reading this same book and estimates say 25 million of these books ARE being read by kids 10 and under… then I think they are not appropriate. Especially inappropriate would be scenes that Bolle did not mention where Bella emotionally blackmails Edward for sex. He does not want to her hurt her again after their initial foray and so she parades around in front of him in skimpy negligees and uses her body to entice him. The last book is very much an adult book in my opinion and in actuality the characters ARE adults by this time. Some of them always were (the vamps). These are young ADULT books…not preteen, teen books.

My daughter is still very young but I would try to keep this series away from her until she was at least 15-16. I see no reason to have her reading about this beautiful man/boy and how much Bella wants to have sex with him and how she uses her body to sway him from his decision to refrain. While it may have some good points, like no sex until marriage even that is portrayed all wrong because all it does is give a foolish reason for teenagers to want to get married… for the sex. I would rather my teen just have sex rather than get married just so they can have sex.

So… the recommendation of this thirty-something mom with 3 kids is that the Twilight movie is okay for kids 13 and up and the first two books are as well. BUT the second two books, IMO, should be put on hold until 15-16 years old and some parental discussions should occur while they are being read. Moms should be reading them too so they get a feel for what their daughter’s might be thinking about sex and relationships.

So what do you think? Is Twilight appropriate for young girls, say 13 and under? Why or why not?