BD - Review & Endless Rambling of Thoughts...

I managed to get about 150 pages into Breaking Dawn on Friday and decided to stop until after the wedding things filled weekend came to a close. I polished off the rest of the book on Monday. This is long and I apologize to anyone who is a non-reader who stumbles across this. ;)

My feelings are still a little scrambled given I read books one-four in such a short time period for the first time & that I am still mentally comparing them to other vampire/werewolf series – but I warn anyways, spoilers ahead.I really enjoyed Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse – much more than I wanted to. While they were not my typical vampire genre (Anne Rice & Christopher Pike), they were immensely entertaining and I will go back & re-read them (and recommend them to my friends, especially my poor unsuspecting vampire loving friend – I need her opinion on this!). I’m excited for the movie in December. I want to discuss this little world that my head’s been swimming in since Wednesday with someone who has a similiar reading background to mine (which granted has been everything but with a deep love of all things vampire).

Reading them back-to-back, however, made it feel that Breaking Dawn wasn’t fully written by Meyer. It smelled of half-assed fan fiction in parts and in other it seemed like a rush to create a gateway to the next series – not that I hated it all (the wedding-honeymoon, the intimacy/sex – finally!, Jacob’s chapters, and the last ten pages or so made me smile). I would walk away after chapters for a few minutes to do some work or take a phone call to take the edge off of the “huh?” or “what the fuck…” feeling

I accepted the changes in basic vampire lore – being able to be out in sunlight, lack of fangs, etc. I even was decent with the conversion method, as Anne Rice (and other novelists) had made it a much more mutual, sure-fire bet. Drain the victim until the point of near death, and then offer back your own blood – it works and it also gives their vampires some sort of life force through fluids; they bleed their own mutated blood, they cry diluted tears of blood, etc. They can go without feeding as they age, as their bodies adjust – no need for constant hunting parties. But one detail I could not wrap my head around was if you build your characters to cease to have bodily fluids how the hell can you have conception? No swimmers, no baby – or at least so I thought. Other series, mainly Underworld gave their characters the ability to procreate, but in this case SM did no such thing as she’s explicitly stated that her characters do not bleed, cry tears, salivate, and so on. I did not realize that semen was a stand-alone product in an otherwise dried up body.

Then there was the utter disappointment that was her use of her own characters. What happened to the Bella/Edward dynamic? We understand that there would of course be a change in feelings once Bella crossed over but Edward took a backseat to other newly introduced characters in Bella’s life. It’s harder to swallow when you’ve built this world that neither can function in without the other. The Cullens had been painted out to be such amazing characters filled with personality at the seams and only Jasper (Jazz – what the hell was that about? Fan fiction slip-up?) seemed to maintain any sort of lovability with him. Charlie doesn’t ask questions even though in the last book he was still undeniably seethingly pissed about Edward’s involvement in Bella’s life – now all of a sudden she LOOKS like him (and family) and he doesn’t ask what’s going on? Was her own cast of characters just so overdone that she simply had to introduce two dozen additional random vampires to fill in the holes? The Volturi – what a disappointment! I wanted a fight! Something! It seemed like such a fuzzy edge to dash… at least JK Rowling had the gall to kill off some of her beloved characters to get her point across.

Jacob. I never took a “team” but I inherently root for the underdog (no pun intended). I didn’t expect him to win Bella after the end of Eclipse but I had figured that he would find his own happy ending without the involvement of Bella & The Cullens. I had almost hoped that he & Leah would mutually bond over their inability to have what they wanted… and make something out of it, something more than the imprinting nonsense. What kind of leg would a seventeen year old have on an essentially ninety+ year old teenager who had that much time to experience human interaction? But the Nessie thing…. I saw it coming but I had hoped I was wrong. Seeing him turn into a dopey babysitter of the spawn he was ready to destroy doesn’t sit right.

Renesmee is a total confusion for me. First she is built up as this monstrous being that is literally killing her human host, despite all impossibilities of conception. Then she magically communicates that she loves and therefore Edward seems to lose his self-loathing over what they managed to create and backs off the proverbial edge. Her birth was indescribable bullshit, in my opinion. I mean really, vampire teeth c-section? Her existence as the perfect, rapidly growing baby… gag. Besides the brown eyes and Charlie’s hair, what’s left of her that’s human, a supposed full half of her? Is she clumsy? Does she attract trouble? She obviously doesn’t gain her mother’s (human) aversion/nausea to blood. They billed her as this magical, unique creature – a symbol of Edward & Bella’s undeniable transcendent love – only to have some off-beat jungle half-breed show up at the end as a result of a wayward vampire’s science experiment. Way to go, SM, in blowing any of the mystic or magic that was in her doubtable creation. In a mere seven years, she’ll magically reach adulthood and run off to make all of Jacob’s dreams come true… Or maybe she’ll inherit her mother’s ability to create a love triangle and have to fight off the magic of imprinting to take a shot at Nahuel.

And while I’ll try to wrap this up, I also had a problem with the undertones of the books as some of the other ladies who’ve reviewed the book have stated. Bella never seemingly wanted children. Yet her story is wrapped up by the end of the fourth book like a perfectly warm, fuzzy package – love, marriage, sex, baby, vampire family all in that perfect little order, no matter how much she begged and pleaded for otherwise. She got to become the rockstar vampire that didn’t suffer the consequences of her creation, of the newborn rage and lack of control. She saves the day in stilettos and silk while looking like a supermodel. Bella’s life is perfect when SM spent the last three books showing it’s not.

“Though Irina's sacrifice was a dark shadow against the white light, keeping the moment from perfection, the joy was impossible to deny. The life I'd fought for was safe again. My family was reunited. My daughter had a beautiful future stretching out endlessly in front of her. Tomorrow I would go see my father; he would see that the fear in my eyes had been replaced with joy, and he would be happy, too.” pg. 826 (digital copy)

What an awesome message to send to teenage girls everywhere - you're life isn't worth living without a man, that a baby solves everything, that you don't always have to pay into consequences, and you can have your cake & eat it too.

I think I'll call this even, for now. ;) I've spent my entire night at the gym trying to build cohesive thoughts and managed to screw it all up on a blog post in less than two hours.