I obviously disagree. Having once been a teenage girl, Twilight was never a thing for me, even when I was younger, and personally, I’ve always found it misogynistic and patronizing to say, in effect, “It doesn’t matter if it’s shit, it’s for girls and that’s what they like.” As if teenage girls don’t deserve something better than Twilight because quality can’t possibly matter to them, they’re teenage girls. Like, no offense, but if someone’s standards are low, don’t rope me into that just because we share a gender. I didn’t want Twilight to have a more male or adult audience. Like, as a lifelong female reader, I didn’t care about the demographics of Twilight’s audience —in fact, in my personal experience, it definitely was older women who were fans of that book, women who were adults in contrast to me and my teenage book-reader friends. So it was definitely a matter of wanting more than Twilight for me, wanting to be taken seriously as a reader, to be treated as if I deserved more than some very bad prose and shallow characterization strung together with tepid romance.

So I’ve never really accepted the “But it’s for teenage girls!” argument when I once was a teenage girl and it was very much not for me. That line of reasoning just seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy for me.

People have been saying things like this for so long, but I think people are confusing the symptom for the disease. The problem at the heart of Twilight is that Meyer was not a good writer.

Even if every change you suggested was implemented and the whole story was restructured and rewritten to star Charlie, Meyer would STILL fuck that up too and write a bad book, and maybe in that alternate universe, people would be crying out “The simple solution was to make the teenage daughter the protagonist!”

I’m being a little glib, but the truth of the matter as I see it isn’t that Twilight in its structure and details had to necessarily suck. In the hands of the right writer, who knows what it could have been — but in the hands of a bad writer, every premise is just going to be wasted potential. The problem is the writer, not the story.

I think your suggestion of leaving it open-ended is a good one, FWIW, but I honestly thought the whole book was trash, so it’s hard for me to say that this one change would have made a significant difference in quality. The author zooms through the whole trial and seems to care so little about it, that the whole “guilty, not guilty” question is rather moot to me. It isn’t as if there’s a ton of focus on evidence and debunking evidence and debating the method of debunking, the lawyers going back and forth. There’s just an occasional testimony, some light cross-examination, and then Kya zones out again, so the narrative stops tracking the courtroom events. The question of whether she killed Chase is apparently unimportant to the author, so its resolution was unimportant to me as a reader.

I honestly have no idea how I have friends on Goodreads. Maybe four or five of them are people that I know irl and talk to about books. The rest seem to just appear. I’ll check one day on a whim and the number will have gone up by a dozen. The functions I use Goodreads for, though, are to take little notes on books and to write reviews (because I find it fun to do so). Everything else is superfluous so I barely interact with people on it at all, beyond maybe making a note specifically for one of those four or five people I know irl about how much they would like a book or passage or whatever.