欧宝娱乐

Reviewer update Aug 2009: I have demoted the book from 5 to 4 stars. My confession/explanation is at the end of the original, unedited review.
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Yes, I gave it 5-stars. This is partly because I was so pleased by it compared to the last two books in the series that I overreacted. But I also approve of her approach to the book and have rated it so highly in order to counteract those reviewers out there who hated it because they felt Bella was a bad example to young girls.

***THESE TWO PARAGRAPHS SPOIL THINGS THAT HAPPEN EARLY IN THE BOOK***
I have a bone to pick with these people. Read some of the reviews on Amazon or GoodReads and you will find a certain type of person who feels that Bella's character fails as a role model for young women today. Why? Because she, gasp, got married and had a child at a young age.

Oh, my, what is the world coming to when young people choose eternal love and devotion! (Oh that more young women could be more like the implausibly articulate yet utterly selfish lead in the movie Juno!) In my favorite example, one reviewer on Amazon claimed it wasn't credible that a girl as young as Bella would feel joy at sensing a baby growing inside her. "I'm 28 and if I felt something moving in me, I would freak," she said, "I can't believe a 19-year old would be happy about it."
***END OF SPOILAGE***

Sadness ensues. Women and men from every culture in every era of history have found a tremendous and peculiar satisfaction in their children. It doesn't matter where you believe this instinct came from, it's real and it manifests millions of times over. Should we be so surprised that Stephenie Meyer would be one of the billions who believe this love to be real? Read the author's bio and it becomes clear: She was married at 21 before she finished college and had three children while still in her 20s. But one can hardly call her a "failure" for choosing family first. By all standards she's fabulously successful and wealthy. Plus, she has a college degree (one of the big beefs some people had with Bella's choice to postpone college). Are we really surprised that Stephenie would see the world through rose-colored, happiness-prone glasses when her own life is exactly that, deliriously happy?

Social polemics aside for a moment. The one thing this book lacked was a satisfying climactic, apocalyptic battle royale between the forces of vampire good and vampire evil. I know this book was intended to cap off a romance series, not The Lord of the Rings but there's a reason books of high fantasy all end in cataclysmic bloodshed. It takes a conflict of such dramatic proportions to drive the point of a story deep into our minds. And the point of this story, if you weren't too focused on your own family planning to notice it, was worthy of such dramatic punctuation.

The real point of this book is that we can and should choose love. That despite our personal weaknesses and faults -- our immature attempts at love and our petty jealousies -- we can make important, permanent decisions that will tie us to other people, making their lives and our lives better in the process. The battle I propose -- one I hope sees the light of day in a future novel -- would seal Bella's decisions and the decisions of her family and loved ones in a way that would render their commitments real. Their marital love, their parental love, their familial love, and the love of fellowship with others who share their principles.

Some would have to die to preserve the love they have made immortal. Others would have to kill to do the same. Nothing is more final, especially for immortals. But they would do so to symbolize the triumph of their love over the petty dynasty of the Volturi and thus establish a global movement of vampires that respect human life and restrain their selfish hungers in deference to the greater good. Something that wise humans do every day.

Such a symbolic battle would take this series to the next level. But even without it, this book is the best evidence that Meyer wasn't really writing a sloppy romance saga for misty-eyed girls, but was instead telling a story about the eternal power of love and self-denial.

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Update from Aug 2009
I have had some fabulous comments to my review (please read them, most are very intelligent). I have been properly chided by many of these reviews for overreacting to the "Bella is a bad role model" flack and failing to acknowledge the principal flaw of this book. Amy said it best below: Meyer shortchanged us by not forcing Bella to face any hard choices. Bella got everything she wanted, including a (strange) relationship with Jacob. Nobody she loved got hurt -- which was the problem I did mention above -- and she never had to disappoint anyone.

Given that a year has passed, I have some distance on all the whining that went on about Bella not being a protofeminist. As a result, I should own up to the fact that this fourth book fails to deliver not only the climax I hoped for, but the real character crisis and development that a saga of this length should strive for. Or that we all should strive for in our own lives, to go all metaphysical on you for a moment. So I have demoted the book from 5 stars to 4 and begun to ruminate on the topic of why Meyer -- a woman possessed of such clear imagination -- was unwilling or unable to make Bella's life hard. Here's what I have come up with, for what it's worth:

1 - Meyer's own life is pretty darn pleasant. Let's be honest, she has everything most people think they want. All of us who struggle to write books that nobody reads desperately wish for her success (a fact that generates more than few snippy comments on 欧宝娱乐, I might suggest). She has a whole community of women around her who adore her and come to all-night parties when she debuts a book or movie, just to be near her. In the end, she might make Bella after her own image because she doesn't know that life ultimately requires pain.

2 - Meyer is a Mormon. For those not acquainted with the faith, Mormonism is a faith that believes everything will ultimately be okay. If not in this life, then in the next. In fact, the whole vampire immortality gig is just a metaphor for the Mormon idea of the afterlife: You get to be with the ones you love forever, without pain. In that way, Bella is a perfect reflection of the ideal Mormon eternity: God forgives us for our idiocy, acknowledges our flawed attempts at love by magnifying them and making them eternal. Though this is only one side of Mormonism -- it's also a faith with sorrowful history of persecution. Mormons certainly suffer plenty in this life just like everyone else, so this explanation is only true to the extent that Meyer has willingly isolated Mormonism's view of the end state of humanity.

3 - Twilight is just escapist fantasy. This is not only the most obvious but probably the strongest of my three explanations. We're so accustomed to watching James Bond run through the street with machine guns trained on him that never hit their mark that we no longer point out that Bond is completely implausible and ultimately unsatisfying as a character. But we're not used to reading fiction in which women get everything they want. (At least, I'm not.) So we get tied up in knots about the lack of deeper meaning and pathos when in reality, Meyer never promised us a garden of sorrow and personal growth.

So even though I have to demote the book, I still feel like the saga was worth reading; both because of the fun I had teasing about its flaws but also because it gives me fodder for worthwhile introspection. Oh, and it connected me to some great commenters who I now follow on 欧宝娱乐.