 Elizabeth Hand of The Washington Post wrote , " Meyer 's prose seldom rises above the serviceable , and the plotting is leaden . " The article , featured on the Yahoo ! website Shine , also criticized the books and the author 's final word on the series was , " Good books deal with themes of longing and loneliness , sexual passion and human frailty , alienation and fear just as the Twilight books do . But they do so by engaging us with complexities of feeling and subtleties of character , expressed in language that rises above banal mediocrity . Their reward is something more than just an escape into banal mediocrity . We deserve something better to get hooked on . " 
