Moving to book two: New Moon
I hope you’re ready for some serious angst, because that’s what this book is all about. In the beginning, after Bella is cut at her birthday party and some of the other vampires, who struggle to not feed on human blood, nearly attack her; the family packs up and leave. Naturally this is done in order to protect Bella. They go into what I call the sacrifice mode, giving up their current fake life in order to protect Bella since Edward cares for her so much.
The story shifts to a severely depressed heroine who eventually turns to one of her childhood friends, who rather conveniently turns out to be a werewolf. And of course that makes him the natural enemy of any and all vampires. I’m sure you can guess what happens next. Nearly two thirds of the book goes completely into to setting her up to be in love with someone else at the same time. This is the temptation that she must overcome, giving into another love interest. This is another similarity but again, true of many religions.
So the author now goes into attempting to develop the other side of the story, or rather the other potential ‘love’ interest. Our lovesick heroine is too miserable and depressed over the loss over her love to move on. Instead she does anything she can to help her remember and hang onto that brief time in her life. She becomes so focused on this that she will risk her life just to hear what she believes is Edward’s voice in her mind talking to her.
It wraps up with the author once again falling back on the crutch of those so-called special abilities of the vampires to pull Bella back into their lives. This, along with the werewolf’s interfering with said abilities, gives all the wrong impressions so Edward, believing her dead, tries to find a way to kill himself. This time, with their help, she has to save Edward. Naturally she has to face great danger in order to do so.
Now honestly, this is where it’s just a bit absurd in my mind. Not only were the ‘big bad vampires’ in this rather unimpressive, most of their more powerful abilities can’t affect our perfect heroine. It was nothing more than an anti-climatic moment where the two can be happily reunited and realize they can’t bear to be apart.
It suffered from some of the same problems the first book did: lack of good character development and descriptions. Just as it also suffered from what I’ve seen in the attitudes of the LDS religion: a woman is not complete without a man. This is not meant to offend, this is meant to show you how I see it. Whether they want to believe it or not, these girls are taught that finding the perfect man is the ultimate dream. Bella, without Edward, is nothing.
The main characters are both way too perfect in their attitude and unconditional love of one another. The rifts are trivial and not the sort of thing that would build a lasting relationship. But if it is your core belief that this is what you are supposed to do, you overlook all of the real problems because if you do, it just magically works out. Not in real life, obviously, but apparently that’s the case here.
Naturally our heroine is being tormented since her perfect love is morally wrong, but the further the story goes, the more she starts to convince herself that he can’t be soulless and evil. You begin to sense an underlying desire for her to love him and redeem him. You also start to get a feel for his own desire to not be a monster, so he can truly love her.
I only wish the story hadn’t continued to stay stale and flat. It still hasn’t gotten beyond the angst and obvious obstacles. There is nothing memorable, just flashy gimmicks and another ‘love’ interest that makes you want to smack the author for being so predictable. Once again my verdict is that it’s boring as hell. I might have even forgiven the werewolf lore if not for the ever so obvious conflict over who she would love.
