Breaking Dawn

I picked up Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer almost a week after it was released. However, I still managed to stay spoiler free until I finished. It just feels like an accomplishment. If you want to stay spoiler free you should not continue to read.

Breaking Dawn begins with Bella and Edward's wedding. Jacob returns from his self imposed exile to see Bella one more time and nearly gets into a fight with Edward when he finds out that they're going to try to have sex while Bella is still human. After the wedding Edward takes Bella to Esme's private island for their honeymoon and, as promised they finally consummate their relationship. After a couple of weeks Bella realizes that she is not only pregnant, but appears to be a few months along already. They race back home where she refused to allow Carlise and Edward to terminate the pregnancy in spite of her failing health. Once the baby is born and Bella becomes a vampire they learn that they will once again have to face the Volturi.

I have an overwhelming feeling of indifference towards Breaking Dawn. I didn't like it very much, but I didn't particularly dislike it either. As usual many of the plot elements were predictable and contrived. As soon as the child vampires were brought up it was pretty clear where the story was headed. This time the story was just not good enough to make me look past the problems, but on the bright side it was still better than New Moon.

The section that was narrated by Jacob was better than I thought it would be and it was nice to get a clearer picture of the wolves lives. I hoped for a little while that something might happen between Leah and Jacob, but that would have been too interesting. Having Jacob imprint on Renesmee so they could all be one big happy family is awfully convenient and really creepy. Meyer spends a lot of time assuring the reader that imprinting is not a sexual thing and that neither Jacob nor Quil is a pedophile, but all that aside that still means that he is going to be Bella's son-in-law. He intends to marry the daughter of his previous object of affection. It's all so very creepy!

It was good to get a look at some of the other vampires outside of the Cullens, but there were so many that I had some trouble keeping them straight. There were more interesting new powers introduced and then not really used. Renesmee's ability to share her thoughts and Bella's power to block the talents of other's are the only one's that really mattered in the end. It was nice to see Bella so empowered after being the human that everyone had to protect for three books, but the big confrontation with the Volturi was so anticlimactic. That's the thing that made the book so problematic, there were no real stakes. One vampire, who has only be talked about before and who caused the whole problem, dies. Everyone else escapes and there's never really any suspense to make the reader think that they won't.

As I said before Breaking Dawn was not all that bad, it just wasn't all that good. Everything was just tied up too neatly with everyone paired off and happy. For the entire series Meyer set up the triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob. Imprinting, no matter how well established as a plot device, feels like a cop out.