New Moon

New Moon
by Stephenie Meyer
YA fantasy. 563 pp.
Little, Brown. 2006.

When the Cullens, including her beloved Edward, leave Forks rather than risk revealing that they are vampires, it is almost too much for eighteen-year-old Bella to bear, but she finds solace in her friend Jacob until he is drawn into a "cult" and changes in terrible ways.

So I finished the book. I needed to finish the book before my parents left this morning because, well, like I want to pack a 563-page book in my luggage at the airport. Odds are it would just send my luggage over the weight limit and I'd have to pay $50 just to get the book home.

Anyway, I was as disappointed with this book as I was with the first one. I guess I should take this as a lesson in the pitfalls of building something up as the Most Amazing Book Ever. (Because I know people who have insisted that I had to read these books for that very reason.) But I guess I'm disappointed with my disappointment, considering that I had lowered my expectations for this book. It was even more overwritten than I had anticipated. It needed an editor even more fiercely than the first one. Bella was even more pathetic than she was in the first. And I even had to dislike Edward in this one.

I haven't decided how I feel about Jacob yet. I think that he and the werewolves were shortchanged in their development. Meyer had one or two chapters where she almost started to get into it, and that would have begun to redeem the book in my eyes, but then she fell through there.

The book isn't all bad; there are moments where Meyer truly writes well and creates a great scene. But those moments don't occur nearly often enough. And my favorite part of the book was where Meyer demonstrated Bella's despondency by putting in blank page after blank page to show the passage of time.

In the end, I'm not impressed. And I'm frustrated. Because I know that I will most likely read Eclipse to see what happens next in the plot; I hate that quirk that I have. But maybe I'll like the next book—maybe, just maybe, Bella will turn into a harpy. That ought to make it interesting.