Chapter 1: Preface of party &

I have a terrible confession to make.

I gave Stephenie Meyer my money. I feel very dirty about this, but it had to be done.

I was using a PDF file I downloaded off the intertubes to do my review of Twilight. There were two main problems with this: first, the page numbers were off (my PDF had about 290 pages while Twilight actually has 498) so I couldn’t properly cite anything; secondly, there were some utterly bizarre formatting and spelling mistakes that were probably the fault of the PDF and not the fault of Meyer… although I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I will feel more legitimate reviewing the rest of the series in its true form.

I almost couldn’t find the book, and I hated every moment of searching for it. The first bookstore I went to didn’t seem to have a Young Adult fiction section. After nervously charging around the store for about half an hour (as if I was going to ask somewhere where they keep the sparkling vampires), I gave up and walked a bit further down rue Ste-Cat to the Indigo. I found the YA section… but it was all in French. I live in Montréal, so things are mostly French here, but bookstores are still largely English. I was worried that maybe Indigo thought tweens couldn’t read English yet or something crazy like that (I am so jealous of kids in Montréal, growing up bilingual while I had to bleed through French Immersion).

So there I am, panicking in the bookstore, staring fretfully at “Tentation” and  wishing it would translate itself into New Moon. I mean, I am fluent in French, but I can’t review the book in French for my English blog!

Proof.

I walked through a few more rows and found the English YA section. Crisis averted. I didn’t want the cashier to judge me and think I have poor taste in fiction, so I grabbed George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings which is the sequel to A Game of Thrones, so that I would have an actual kickass fantasy novel to prove that I don’t have bad taste because I am self-conscious.

Alright, enough stalling. Let’s crack open New Moon and see what my best friend in the world, Bella Swan is up to.

Preface & Chapter One: Party

New Moon opens with that Smeyer Vagueness™ we are used to, with a page of Bella running through what she thinks is a dream. It’ll probably show up in the end of the book somewhere.

Smeyer creatively moves onto another dream in Chapter One.

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure I was dreaming. (pg.3)

Shut up, Bella, that is no way to start the first chapter in a published novel.

Smeyer is doing that annoying thing that authors do in sequel novels where she is recapping was happened in the last book, which involves Bella having a dream, as per usual. Bella thinks she is in heaven with her grandmother, but Edward is there for some reason, sparkling away, and Bella is all, “oh crap, I have to explain to Grandma that I am dating a sparkling douchebag who wants to eat me.”

I didn’t have to look to know who it was; this was a voice I would know anywhere — know, and respond to, whether I was awake or asleep… or even dead, I’d bet. The voice I’d walk through fire for — or, less dramatically, slosh every day through the cold and endless rain for. (pg.4)

THAT IS NOT HOW WE WRITE THINGS, MEYER. I don’t know where to begin with this one. The abuse of punctuation, those dangling prepositions, the dripping hyperbolized romance. Here, my friends, is proof that even a university degree IN ENGLISH LITERATURE does not make one smart. Who gave Smeyer that diploma? Was it the Mormons? It was the Mormons, wasn’t it?

After many wasted pages, Meyer reveals that it was a dream, and we find out that it was an old Bella in her dream, not her grandmother, because Bella is afraid of getting old.

Because today is Bella Swan’s birthday.

Happy birthday, Bella! YOU ARE FINALLY AT THE AGE OF CONSENT CONGRATULATIONS now go kiss your hundred-year-old boyfriend.

Bella’s birthday is the worst day of Bella’s life because she is eighteen but Edward will always be “seventeen.” Bella spends one sentence noting that she had the best summer of her life before running to the mirror to check for wrinkles and launching into her usual list of complaints and incessant whining. Oh Bella. It’s really you. You’re back.

I wasn’t entirely able to avoid my dad, and so I had to spend a few minutes acting cheerful. I honestly tried to be excited about the gifts I’d asked him not to get me, but every time I had to smile, it felt like I might start crying. (pg.7)

You’re lucky Charlie didn’t force you to become homeless after than stunt you pulled in the last book, you ungrateful bitch! You should be thankful he even speaks to you, let alone gives you presents.

Bella goes to school, where Alice and Edward are waiting for her. It seems like Alice and Bella are BFFs now. Edward is just as gushed over as ever.

Even after half a year with him, I still couldn’t believe that I deserved this degree of good fortune. (pg.7)

That is some nice self-esteem you are promoting there, Smeyer.

I looked into his liquid topaz eyes, and my heart gave a not-quite-so-gentle squeeze of its own. Hearing the stutter in my heartbeats, he smiled again. (pg.9)

Smeyer, there are two things I would really like from you. First, to take a fucking biology lesson. Or get your ears checked out. Can you actually hear peoples’ hearts beating from several feet away? As well, it’d be great if you stopped using the word topaz. I lost track of how many times you used it just in this chapter. Because it’s not a very good word to use to describe colour.

I couldn’t really see Edward’s point, to be honest. What was so great about mortality? Being a vampire didn’t look like such a terrible thing. (pg.10)

SHUT UP, BELLA

“I thought my birthday was about what I want.” (pg.11)

SHUT UP, BELLA, SHUT UP SHUT UP

We had almost every class together now — it was amazing the favors Edward could get the female administrators to do for him. (pg.12)

SERIOUSLY BELLA STOP PROMOTING MISOGYNY

Attention is never a good thing, as any other accident-prone klutz would agree. (pg.12)

BELLA I HATE YOU

College was Plan B. I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human… (pg.13)

SHUT UP BELLA YOU’RE BEING AN IDIOT

But how could I let him give me things when I had nothing to reciprocate with? He, for some unfathomable reason, wanted to be with me. Anything he gave me on top of that just threw us more out of balance. (pg.13)

At lunch, Bella “introduces” all her friends. What I mean to say is she lists their names and we will probably never hear about them again. There are even two names I don’t remember hearing before. It is heartwarming how much Bella values her friendships.

Bella and Edward go to Bella’s house where they watch Romeo and Juliet. Edward whispers Romeo’s lines in Bella’s ear which I find to be very creepy, but maybe that’s what most chicks are into these days.

Edward then talks about how he doesn’t plan on living without Bella, so when he thought James might have killed her in the last book, he was going to go to Italy to “provoke the Volturi.” The Volturi are apparently a group of very old and powerful vampires, so Edward was going to use them to kill himself if Bella died. HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS.

I can see how this was inspired by Romeo and Juliet. Did Shakespeare forget to remind Meyer that Romeo and Juliet was a cautionary tale?

Edward takes Bella to his house because his whole family has been preparing for Bella’s birthday party. They don’t get to celebrate birthdays, but Bella doesn’t care. Bella just wants to mope and complain that they are paying attention to her and whine about how she begged for them not to get her presents.

You know what sort of people say they don’t want presents?

People who fucking want presents.

Alice, I assumed, had covered every flat surface with pink candles and dozens of crystal bowls filled with hundreds of roses. There was a table with a white cloth draped over it next to Edward’s grand piano, holding a pink birthday cake, more roses, a stack of glass plates, and a small pile of silver-wrapped presents.

It was a hundred times worse than I’d imagined. (pg.25)

Maybe this is just a personal thing for me, but few things bother me more than people who hate their birthday and spend the entire week leading up to their birthday complaining about it and then their whole birthday complaining about it when all I want to do is make them a nice cake to show them I am glad they were born. I love my birthday, and I especially love my friends’ birthdays. When I was a teenager, I had a friend who shared my birthday, and she acted just like Bella on her birthday. I would wish my friend a happy birthday, and instead of saying happy birthday back to me, she would grunt and roll her eyes and storm off. She managed to ruin every single one of my birthdays being so self-centered and sour. So excuse me if I can’t stand Bella complaining about being showered with love and gifts.

SO THEN THIS HAPPENS

Bella is opening a gift from Edward & Alice. She gets a papercut from the wrapping paper and begins to bleed. Naturally, Jasper goes crazy and lunges at her, so Edward pushes her out of the way and Bella goes flying into the table, smashing the crystal plates and glasses. As Edward wrestles with Jasper, Bella gouges her arm open on the broken glass since we all know how much Smeyer loves goring Bella up. Now there is blood pooling everywhere in a room of six vampires.

I really hope they eat Bella.

Tags: abusive relationships, bad writing, bella swan, books, creepy, critique, edward cullen, fantasy, feminism, fiction, high school, meyer, mormon, mormonism, new moon, relationships, review, romance, sexism, stephenie meyer, stockholm syndrome, the cullens, twilight, twilight saga, vampires

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Chapter 19: Farewell

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I realize it's taken me a while to write about this chapter. I've been putting it off. This chapter bothered me, and I wasn't sure how to write about it. I'm not sure how I feel about what Smeyer is doing. On one hand, I'm happy there is finally a plot, but on the other hand, I feel very strange about the plot Smeyer chose. She's the author, she is in charge of this. Anything could happen. And still, she chooses this?

It's also bothering me that I am actually thinking this hard about Twilight.

So, at the end of the last chapter, suddenly things were happening and we were all caught quite off guard. Bella and Edward had devised a plan to lie to Charlie, run away from Forks and hunt James. At least, I think that is what is happening.

I felt moisture filling up my eyes as I looked at Emmett. I barely knew him, and yet, somehow, not knowing when I would see him again after tonight was anguishing. I knew this was just a faint taste of the goodbyes I would have to survive in the next hour, and the thought made the tears start to spill.

I'm a little weirded out by Bella crying about Emmett, since he has child or be a jerk to her so far, holding her down in the car against her will as she had a small mental meltdown just a few minutes ago. But … I should probably be used to the stockholm syndrome by now.

Bella launches The Plan into action by hamming up the tears and telling Edward not to listen to anything else she says tonight. She begins by screaming at Edward, running upstairs to her room, slamming the door behind her, and screaming at Charlie to leave her alone as she packs her bags. Poor Charlie is terrified vague that Edward has hurt her. OH CHARLIE!!!

Someone, please, give this man a hug. Best Dad Ever.

Bella pretends she broke up with Edward. Naturally, this confuses Charlie.

He spun me around to look at him, and I could see in his face that he had no intention of letting me leave. I could think of only one way to escape, and it involved hurting him so much that I hated myself for even considering it. But I had no time, and I had to keep him safe. I glared up at my father, fresh tears in my eyes for what I was about to do.

"I do like him — that's the problem. I can't do this anymore! I can't put down any more roots here! I don't want to end up trapped in this stupid, boring town like Mom! I'm not going to make the same dumb mistake she did. I hate it — I can't stay here another minute! "

His hand dropped from my arm like I'd electrocuted him. I turned away from his shocked, wounded face and headed for the door.

Officially depressed forever. At the very least, Bella has the humanity to feel bad abut what she is doing … but she does it regardless. If this isn't one of the saddest, most are manipulative things you've ever heard, let me put this in context for you: these are the same words Bella's mother said when she left Charlie. The mistake Bella and her mother made was Charlie.

"Just let me go, Charlie." I repeated my mother's last words as she'd walked out this same by so many years ago. I said them as angrily as I could manage, and I threw the door open. "It didn't work out, okay? I really, really hate Forks! " My cruel words did their job — Charlie stayed frozen on the doorstep, stunned, while I ran into the night.

Can someone please give Charlie a hug? Please? He's done nothing wrong. He wasn't even a jerk to Bella's mum, so the divorce wasn't even his fault. He is a genuinely wonderful person, perhaps the only one in this entire book. And what does Meyer do? She decides to destroy him.

This is where I am having a hard time. I like when bad things happen in books. I like having my heart torn apart with empathy for the characters. I like to understand why bad people do the bad things they do, and I like the tragedy of good things happening to good people. That is what makes a story incredible. But what is happening here isn't like that. The conflict was so out of the blue and so rushed into that it still feels as disgustingly contrived as the rest of the novel. I feel utterly confused at how quickly things are suddenly happening. I feel like none of the characters have real motives. It feels like Smeyer just needed some kind of tragedy to happen, so she picked the worst thing that popped into her head, even though it didn't make sense and didn't flow with the rest of the book.

I also have a problem with how fucking predictable this is. As if women have never been portrayed as are manipulative, overemotional, irrational bitches before. It bothers me deeply that Meyer's solution is to get Bella to have a fit and say Charlie has ruined her life, because it is precisely what any chauvinist would expect from a woman. And then, and then, Smeyer still has the gall to turn around and say Bella is a feminist icon.

The worst part about all of this is that the plan isn't going to work. According to Charlie, Renée, Bella's mum, is going to be moving back to Phoenix from Florida early, and it seems the tracker heard the end of Bella's performance, so once Bella is speeding away with the Cullens, it seems the tracker is running after them, and will likely catch up with them soon. All that, for nothing. This isn't tragedy. Tragedy is good. This is just terrible.

Edward manages to make me even angrier:

It is partially your fault. " His voice was wry. "If you didn't smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered."

What. The. Fuck. This is one step away from saying, "if you didn't have boobs, I wouldn't have raped you. It is entirely your fault. " THANKS, religious thinking, for reminding me ONCE AGAIN that women are the cause of all bad in the world! I'm so sick of this theme coming up again and again in this novel. How can any of you read this stuff and not see anything wrong with it?

Anyway … eventually they show up chez Cullen, and a bunch of stuff is going on that I don't understand. There is a lot of banter about what everyone is going to do, and a lot of it involves discussing how Bella smells, just to freak me out a little bit more.

Jasper and I looked at each other. He stood across the length of the entryway from me… being careful.

"You're wrong, you know," he said quietly.

"What?" I gasped.

"I can feel what you're feeling now — and you are worth it."

"I'm not," I mumbled. "If anything happens to them, it will be for nothing."

"You're wrong," he repeated, smiling kindly at me.

I like you, Jasper.

Tags: twilight, feminism, sexism, religion, mormon, mormonism, fiction, literature, books, relationships, romance, fantasy, review, critique, vampires, stephenie meyer, meyer, bella swan, bad writing, edward cullen, abusive relationships, creepy, the cullens

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Chapter 20: impatience

I'm not sure if "impatience" the right word is, but it's something.

In this episode of girl & Twilight, Bella sits in a hotel room in Phoenix, similar to a phone, remember the patterns on the walls, eat a few pieces of fruit, chirping, protests, blames itself endlessly and indicates that it is actually without Edward on the side would die.

Look, I'm pretty quick at methysi at this point. During this time I honestly to find the good parts of this book. I've tried to prove that is more than fanfiction degrees in writing. I'm trying to understand how this thing actually was published, and try to discover what everyone loves about it.

After 20 chapters after TeSSERIS EKATONTADES SELiDES, the major impact that a vampire, Bella and Edward wants to eat. There is no increase in character. No one has gone beyond what they were before 400 pages. We do not have learned anything. There is no dominant themes in the history, and the plot is so late and sporadically do, I have a hard time there still permit.

That particular chapter is a real proof of Smeyer "skills" Is 17 pages of nothing happening. Nothing at all. 17 pages Bella whine and a small, dark corner await of death because they then Edward almost are explored. Is not the healthy children.

You can read about about what will happen, but you can look after the Hypnotoad instead of several hours.

ALL GLORY AND POWER TO THE HYPNOTOAD

Bella wakes up in a hotel room is 3 hour says she can't remember how they arrived, but then it launches in a MultiPage description of how they're there. Alice and Jasper resulted there in a day, what happens to sound like a big deal, as Google Maps says that it's only a journey 27 hours (you know that smeyer also checked). Way to go, guys, you saved 3 hours.

Bella is going to sit down with Alice and Jasper. Alice says must wait to call, Carlisle. Do that. Bella phone looks and frets about Edward. The frets on the fact that a compensation. Really, nothing happens. It is almost as bad as and when Bella is told on the internet. Except worse, because we are almost at the end of the book and the things happen.

It's almost like Smeyer to "feeling trying", but this almost how to achieve this is conceived without boring our nearly to death.

Suddenly, Alice has a vision and tells us that will James a room filled with mirrors later today. This draws a picture and Bella recognizes somehow if the dance studios near House that hasn't been seen in ten years. Truly, a Dance Studio is in the future. Time for some Ballet vampire to go with a baseball Bat.

Edward calls. Damn, this is so frustrating. Things start happening, then suddenly stop. Or, for all sorts of crazy nonsense as fast as quickly outside nowhere will begin. Smeyer have no fucking idea how to edit a story with every main stream.

When Bella James maybe to dance studios near House realizes, the rapporteur has decided to call your MOM, Renée, and leave a message to warn her to leave Florida.

And um ... that's all, all. Sorry this is so short?

With a little luck you dusk until the end of the week. And then it's time for movie! If anyone has a copy of the new moon movie at twilight or want to lend me, that would be great. I don't want my money give a penny Meyer and if you avoid the movie that you can while still free download, that would be sweet. Right now I am using PDF copies of the novels, but instead will use a copy in paper form to cite quotes and stuff.

Tags: Twilight, feminism, fiction, books, links, fiction, revision, critique, vampires, stephenie meyer, meyer, bella Swan, edward cullen, poorly written, abusive relationships

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