Two Stephenie Meyer links.
• From Time Magazine (via Gail):
Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic. She creates a compulsion in the reader that is not unvampiric.
Melanie is, I think, the very antithesis of Bella, if that puts any of you at ease. Hmm. No, that might not be true, now that I ponder it more. We're told she's the opposite of Bella, but due to the situation, I don't know that Bella would do anything different.