Wes' Book Review: Twilight - New Moon

 

This book picks up with our heroine Isabella (Bella) Swan just before her birthday. In spite of Bella's pleas, Edward (and his coven the Cullen family) throw Bella a birthday party. As luck would have it Bella being the most hapless person on gods green earth manages to give herself a paper-cut reading a birthday card in a room full of vampires. Jasper, the weakest willed of the vampires who have sworn off blood, loses his wits completely and goes in for the kill at the smell of a single drop of her blood (like the shark from Finding Nemo). Edward steps in to stop Jasper from killing Bella and somehow in the fracas she manages to smash into something and cut her arm open. Now pouring blood from her arm the rest of the family, as strong as their will to not drink blood is, and as much as they love Bella, can not be in the same room as her while Carlisle the head of the household and only vampire doctor ever, stitches Bella's arm up.

 

Yes, Carlisle's resolve is THAT strong. He and Bella chat about how and why Edward was changed into a vampire by Carlisle, Carlisle's faith and spirituality, and what Edward believes spiritually in relation to that. Edward takes Bella home and this begins his attempt for brouter (brooding and pouting remember) of the century. Bella takes this to mean that to keep her safe Edward is going to take her and they are going to run far away together, where they will, I assume, own a pony farm and he will walk around without his shirt on. After a couple days of being pensive, Edward takes Bella into the forest and informs her that to protect her from the Cullens, the entire family is moving away and he was dumping her. Then Edward leaves Bella all alone having a nervous breakdown in the rain lost in the forest. I have to be honest, even for a vampire, that's cold blooded. Bella is of course eventually rescued.

 

Then she goes cataonic for a while. Like four months.

 

Charlie (Bella's father) finally snaps at having to hang out with an unresponsive teenage girl and threatens to send her back to live with her mother in Jacksonville Florida. She sidesteps having to leave Forks Washington by promising her father she will make an attempt at having a social life, really just trying to find a different place to be catatonic so she doesn't have to leave Forks, the place where she met and shared so many fantastic memories with Edward (you know like that time those two vampires were hunting her to kill her, hahaha good times). Out with a friend Bella tries to confront some rapists from the first book only to discover they weren't the same rapists. In the process discovering that when Bella puts herself in harms way she has a mini psychotic episode where she vividly hears Edwards voice in her head. This is as good as an excuse as any for Bella to pick up two old motorcycles off the side of the road and take them to Jacob Black to fix up with money from her after school job working at a sporting goods store.

 

This of course means that Bella is now spending a lot of time hanging out at the reservation of La Push and in Jacob Black's garage. Which leads to them just generally spending a lot of time together. Hiking, doing homework together, even in one instance going to see a movie together. For all intents and purposes Jacob Black and Bella are now dating, except for the fact that really she's just using him to have what she feels are deeply psychotic episodes so she can hear Edwards voice in her head. Bella even admits several times she knows she's using Jacob and his infatuation for her advantage, but of course none of that matters I guess when you've experienced the most perfect beautiful boy in existence's voice in your head. You should just go ahead and be as selfish as you want, anyone else's feelings be damned. Jacob gets upset that Quil (one of Jacob's friends) isn't spending as much time with him as he used to, but instead with an older boy named Sam Uley and his gang who refer to themselves as protectors. While all this is going on Bella hears rumors about a giant dog the size of a grizzly bear and bodies begin turning up in the woods from her father the police cheif and around the sporting goods store.

 

Then Jacob starts hanging out with Sam Uley and his gang, neglecting his friendship with Bella. So Bella hikes to the meadow where she spent the day discovering all about Edwards being a vampire and in turn runs into Laurent, one of the vampire trio from the first book. Laurent informs Bella that even though James (the vampire that was hunting her in the first book) was dead, as revenge, Victoria (Jame's Vampire mate) had decided to get back at Edward by killing Bella. Laurent then is about to kill Bella himself when a pack of super giant wolves comes into the clearing and chases Laurent into the woods. Bela runs home knowing now that Victoria the red-haired vampire from the first book was hunting her.

 

Bella finally gets Jacob to start talking to her again, and without disobeying orders to not tell Bella about his being a werewolf, gets to her to guess as much. Bella is still thinking the werewolves were responsible for all the murders lately, even though she had seen one vampire try to eat her, and heard about another in the area with the intentions of killing her (which is just speciest to me). So Bella confronts Jacob about it and he laughs her off (though he should have probably been deeply offended at her hypocrisy), and he tells her that the werewolves were there to hunt vampires. That was their sole purpose for existing. This of course is a boon for Bella because she just so happened to be being hunted by a vampire. What a coincidence.

 

 

Well I guess Bella's feelings for Jacob weren't as mixed as she pretends they are, because in attempt to bring on another episode, and hear Edwards voice again she tries to go cliff diving where she had seen some of the boys from reservation doing it earlier in the story. Of course this is Bella, so she does it just as a hurricane force storm is about to brew and almost drowns herself in the process. Bella's saved at the very last minute by Jacob and when she's escorted home discovers Alice Cullen's car in front of her house. Alice had seen Bella jump off the cliff in one of her visions of the future and came to make sure she was okay.

 

Edward calls to check on Bella because he had heard from Rosalie Cullen than Bella had committed suicide. When Edward phones and asks for Charlie, Jacob answers the phone and says "he's at the funeral" (meaning the funeral for one of Charlie's old friends who had a heart attack). Edward assumes Jacob means Bella's funeral and decides he's going to go to Italy to pick a fight with the oldest vampire coven in existence as a way of committing suicide. Alice sees this in a vision and tells Bella and the two of them leave for Italy. Leaving Jacob back in Forks to clean up the mess she left with Victoria of course.

 

The Volturi (the old vampire coven) refuse to flat out kill Edward, so his plan is to walk into a square butt naked and sparkly in their city. Which is breaking rule number one of being a vampire in the Volturi's city, hoping his big 'eff you in the eh' will get him slaughtered. Bella stops him just in the nick of time and Alice, Edward, and Bella are taken before the Volturi. They want to recruit the three of them for their unique abilities (Edward's mind reading, Alice's future seeing, and Bella's inability to be affected by any of the vampires mind powers so it seems). They refuse and the Volturi say that's fine but Bella has to be killed because humans aren't supposed to know that vampires exist (except of course the humans that work for the Volturi). Edward and Alice save Bella by promising that they will eventually turn her into a vampire, which of course suits Bella just fine because it should have been done forever ago anyways. The trio make their escape back to Forks.

 

The Cullens decide to move back into their old place and take a vote to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward and Bella officially get back together. Edward manages to argue it out that Bella won't be changed into a vampire until at least after her high school graduation. Even offering at one point to change Bella that night if she agreed to marry Edward (which was something else that confused me, shouldn't she have jumped at that chance?). Jacob returns Bella's motorcycle to get her in trouble with Charlie, but also to throw a wrench in the plans of turning Bella into a vampire by reminding Edward that the La Push tribe and the Cullens agreement didn't say there would be peace between them if the Cullens didn't KILL anyone, but that the Cullens had agreed they would not BITE anyone.

 

Now for my feelings.

 

I know I complained about the pacing of the last book, but it's the one thing that really bothers me the most so far about this series. This book almost six hundred pages and it doesn't feature one of three main characters in it for almost four hundred. Meyers uses four hundred pages to talk about the emotional agony Bella is suffering from being dumped and her inability to just simply move onto another, in my opinion, much better guy. Then Meyers uses roughly one hundred and fifty pages on the real action and danger in the story. Yes the romance is dialed much further down, but it was replaced with indecision and was nothing short of agonizing for me at points.

 

Remember when you were watching the Matrix sequels? How at the end of the film it wrapped up without including ANY of the subplots it had written into itself. How one moment, a hundred different stories were trying to tie themselves up, and then the next, none of them mattered anymore and you REALLY felt like you had wasted your time paying attention at all? That's how I felt here. I invested myself in the tension between Bella and Jacob and her feelings for him hoping that at the very least there could have been something between Bella and Jacob for Edward to be jealous of. If it meant I didn't ONLY have to hear about their dislike for one another based solely on the fact that one was a vampire and the other a werewolf.

 

Well no such luck. Bella is pretty much completely faithful and all I have to look forward to in the rest of the series is them being at each others throats based on their races, not on anything important like Jacob being the one to take Bella's virginity when Edward dated her first. Now THERE'S something to start a fistfight over. Also, a petty complaint maybe, but she really has a tendency to beat one over the head with ideas sometimes. The Romeo and Juliet being brought up over and over and over again in the story, and to a lesser extent, I GET IT, JACOB LOOKED BIGGER AND BIGGER AND BIGGER. By the end of the book I was expecting Jacob to say "INYUK CHUCK!" before he transformed himself into a werewolf.

 

Does this change my opinion of the series? Not really. I've been told that this book is the worst of the series, and while I didn't personally enjoy it, I could see how someone else could. Bringing werewolves into the mythos of this story of course adds a certain depth to it, and brings all the Stephanie Meyer fans that much closer to loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hey you know we have a full on werewolf/human romance in Buffy over here? He even takes her virginity and it's ADORABLE!). I still feel like this is a boon to all of nerd kind and I still feel like no one really has a ton of room to bash the series. I don't think the girls/women that adore these books are dumb for doing so, even if there isn't as much kicking OR kissing in this book. There's a ton of set-up in this book for the rest of the series, and I'm curious to see if Meyer has what it takes to wrap it all up correctly. So I guess I'll have to leave it there, until I can read these other two books I have sitting here and see for myself if Meyer lived up to the potential material she's set in motion with New Moon.