Living the Fictional Dream

I finished Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series last Monday night, but it’s taken me a while to articulate my thoughts on the subject. Then, today, I was flabbergasted to realize how much controversy there’s been over it in fandom. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the last book in a series… a series that’s very important to a lot of people. It would be hard for any one book to meet everyone’s expectations.

So… what do I say about this book. Well, first of all, I’ll start by saying that this entry will include spoilers, so read on at your own risk.

Spoilers. Got it?

Sure you want to continue.

OK then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Now that we’re actually talking about the book, I’m going to come right out with it. I enjoyed it. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but like it, I did. Stephanie Meyer has this way about her writing and her characters. Her books suck me in and refuse to let me go. She is a master at creating the vivid, continuous fictional dream, and that is the mark of a good writer in my mind.

That said, the previous books in the series I read in about 24 hours. This one took me much longer. Though, that had something to do with the fact that I had to help my sister move, so I was separated from the book for most of the Saturday following the book release party.

After having a little time to reflect on it, I will say that this is not my favorite of Meyer’s work. It is possibly the weakest book in the Twilight series. It’s definitely not as good as The Host, my favorite of Meyer’s books to date. But, I think that Meyer did some things right, too.

So, I’ll start off with the things I liked:

• The wedding — Bella and Edward’s wedding was the culmination of several books’ worth of expectations. Very sweet.
• Jacob’s pack — I loved the Jacob/Seth/Leah pack. Very cool. Jacob learning how to ascend into his own. I hope we get a book all about the La Push werewolves. That would be awesome. Leah would be a really interesting main character, I think!
• Bella’s transformation into a vampire — I had some problems with this, too, but, as a whole, I liked that she was good at the whole vampire thing. It made sense to me. She was so clumsy as a human, and she struggled for so long and was never able to find her place. Maybe this was what she had been born for all along. A dramatic illustration of coming of age.

  All along in this series, people have criticized Meyer for being so hard on Bella, and Meyer said that it wasn’t that she was anti-woman, she was anti-human, meaning that of course a human would be weak and pitiful next to the incredibly powerful vampires that inhabit her world. In some ways, this proved her point. Bella ascended into that pantheon, and now she is as amazing and wonderful as all the rest of them. It fit to me that she was good at immortality. Bella came into her own.

  I also liked the writing from the Bella-vamp’s POV. We’ve watched the vamps through Bella’s human eyes for so long. Getting their POV was very cool, and Meyer explained the way the world is to them very well.

• Renesme — Like with the previous subject, there were things I didn’t like about this, but it was definitely an unexpected plot twist. Once they were on their honeymoon and Bella started having those dreams, I figured out what was going on, but it definitely wasn’t something I ever saw coming before that. Though, perhaps I should have figured it out from that immortal child thing discussed early on…

  I read some comments where people thought Bella’s devotion to her unborn child was uncharacteristic, given her fear of marriage and commitment and stuff she said in previous books about not liking kids. I’ve also read people who thought it was Meyer putting a didactic pro-life message into her books. Honestly, I don’t think either of those are true. Well, maybe the latter, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I totally believe that you might think you don’t want kids, but then get pregnant and change your mind. Motherhood is a powerful thing. No one knows what they are going to do or feel about it until it actually happens to them.

  I actually liked the character of Nessie fairly well. There was a bit of the saccharine to her, but the sweetness wasn’t all bad. And I really liked the whole nonverbal communication thing. There was stuff I didn’t like, too, but I think when the character grows up, she might actually be interesting.

• The expansion of the world — I loved meeting all the different vampires in this ‘verse. I wish we’d gotten more time with them. Despite the length of the book, the sheer number of characters brought in during the last segment limited how much we could know about each of them. We couldn’t get very much depth. But I thought the additional knowledge about the rest of the vampire world was quite interesting. There were more characters I would like to know more about in future stories.
• The happy ending — OK, there are problems with this, as well, but considering this was the last new Bella/Edward story (Midnight Sun doesn’t count since it’s an old story from a different POV) I was glad that it ended happily ever after for them. This is not great literature — it’s fun, escapist fiction. I deserved a happily ever after for Bella and Edward, damn it!

Now for some things I didn’t like:

• The happy ending — The problem with the happy ending is that it was too happy for too many characters. We should have had something bad happen in the end, possibly the death of a more minor character (but more major than Irina… I had totally forgotten about her until they talked about her in the book). I wanted Edward and Bella to end up together and happy, but a note of bittersweetness to the story would have made that happiness more poignant.
• Nessie and Jacob — I’m not sure about this imprinting thing. At first, I thought it was a good thing, because it was the lynchpin that allowed so much of the rest of the happiness to fall into place. I read someone being creeped out because of their age difference. That didn’t bother me. Quinn imprinted on a child, too. I guess I don’t see imprinting as a sexual kind of love. Maybe eventually it could turn into that, but I just see it as love. I actually think of it more as the love a dog has for its human (which makes me sad, because poor Jacob!). It’s pure and unconditional, not pervy or weird. I actually think that if Nessie ends up choosing someone else, while Jacob would be hurt, he would probably do whatever he could to make her happy anyway — it’s that kind of love.

  However, because Jacob imprinted on Nessie, it solved things too easily. Suddenly, the whole Cullen/werewolf fued is over — poof. Everything’s great. Between Jacob and Edward, too. There was a realism about the sacrifice and the choices in Eclipse and New Moon. The pain was real, gritty, and hard. This fixed it almost too pat. And while the Jacob fangirl in me was really glad that he doesn’t have to go through that pain any more, I kind of feel cheated about getting to read about him going through that pain. I love Jacob, and I loved the POV bits we’ve had from him. I was really hoping that he would get his own book after this — a book where he (and whoever else was in his pack, perhaps) went on their own adventure, and Jacob would have his own coming of age. Now that’s mostly moot. The rest of his life will be about Nessie, and that’s the end of it. There are still seeds for a future book about Jacob and Nessie, but I think it would have to be told from Nessie’s POV. Jacob’s POV probably will be boring because it will be Nessie time 24-7.

  Also, I just gotta say… Renesme is the stupidest name in the whole world. Yikes! (Though, since I’ve read Anne McCaffery’s Pern series, name smooshing does have other origins for me. It’s not all Bennifer and TomKat. So perhaps I wasn’t quite as horrified as some people were.

• The other characters — There was so much going on in this book that a lot of the regular characters got the short shrift. Pretty much all of the Cullens, most notably. I kinda think we should have had an Alice book, even if it were just a short one, shorter than the Jacob book. I love her and Jasper, and it killed me that they were gone. I have to say, it was almost more interesting, though, that they’d run off to save themselves. Though them showing up to save the day was interesting. I wish we’d had more Rosie time. I actually started to like her in the last book — I would have liked to see more of her in this book than the snarling beast who only cares about the baby and not Bella.
• The climax — There was so much build up, and then… nothing. That was a let down. Pages and pages of build up for absolutely nothing. No fight at all. There should have been a fight. Even if they won in the end, there should have been a fight. Or, alternatively, we shouldn’t have had that much build up for it. With less build up, there would have been a lot lower expectations for the encounter.
• Super Bella — The super shield thing and the extreme ease with the blood lust was a bit much. It bordered on Mary Sue, or how I felt about Anita Blake after she became the most uber-powerful person in that ‘verse. I stand by my opinion on liking the idea that she’d been made for immortality. However, if that was going to happen, then she shouldn’t have had the uber-powerful shield, too. It was just ridiculous at the battle. She’d worked so hard with no results and then, poof, she could shield not only herself but every other person on their team?! That was just dumb. Too much perfection is just wish fulfillment, not a story.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the series. It was enjoyable to read. It swept me up and wouldn’t let me down. Meyer is a talented writer, and I would read more of her stories.

I word of warning though (for anyone who’s actually read this far). If you have younger kids, I would recommend reading the series, and especially Breaking Dawn before you let them read it. This book veered more into adult territory than any of the others. I’m not going to say don’t let them read it. I would just say, you read it, too, so you can talk about it with them.