Some people just have all the luck. Unfortunately, sometimes that luck is quite profoundly bad. Take, for example, the protagonist of Stephenie Meyer’s “Three Down One To Go!” novel Eclipse. Third in the Twilight Saga, it almost serves as a perfect example of why you don’t fall in love with supernatural creatures. Bella, the abovementioned protagonist, has just come off from summer break after rescuing her one-true-vampire-love, and is now really bursting at the seams in her attempts to join her beloved (Edward Cullen) in immortality vis a vis being turned into a member of the anti-sunlight league.

At this point in the three-book-long plot arc, Bella becoming a vampire sounds like a great idea. Not only has the Cullen family promised the Volutri vampire law enforcement that they will turn or kill Bella because she “knows too much” (cue creepy thunder effect), but also because there is a renegade vampire hell-bent for leather on extracting against Bella revenge for the death of the rogue’s mate. Of course, it wouldn’t be interesting in there weren’t some real conflict, so Bella and the Cullens have to deal with a pack opf vampires that, due to some mystiuc legends and the archetypes presented by every vampire story ever, are the sworn enemies of all bloodsuckers. Even if those bloodsuckers, like the Cullen family, deliberately do not attack humans and go hunting for deer and mountain lions and a whole range of former Disney characters. The vampires and werewolves have an uneasy truce that allows both the live in resentful harmony, but this truce prevents the Cullens from biting anyone. Even if that bite is to save one of the vampires’ twit of a girlfriend from becoming the victim of a vampire power trip.

So here is Edward, torn between preserving the truce (and his girlfriend’s humanity, a commodity he has a almost insanely high regard for), and cementing the immortal bonds of love with his beloved Bella. Thnking himself quite clever, he comes up with the idea of having Bella marry him first, trying to use Bella’s fear and loathing of marriage (based on experience with he parents) to stall the time at which he has to bite her. Bella agrees to the idea of getting married at 19, and at the point that they would start happily planning immortality together, the rogue vampire with blood revenge on the brain shows up and starts making a mess of things. The werewolves and vampires extend their truce to a joint venture in the protection of Bella, since both sides have such a vested interest in her, and the vampiress is swiftly apprehended with a decent amount of suspense and derring-do. It comes out the Bella has agreed to marry Edward, and Bella’s old werewolf friend, Jacob (who has a very romantic inclination toward our young heroine) goes howling off into the night to morun his lot in life. The book ends with the beginning of preparations for the wedding, giving the Saga its biggest cliffhanger ending to date.

Despite my harsh descriptions above, I actually quite liked this volume of the Twilight Saga. It had a good balance of action to drama, kept up Meyer’s more than adequate writing style, and moved the plot closer and closer to that penultimate event looming since halfway through book one, that of Bella’s joining the vampire race.

I will admit I’m facing a struggle here as to whether I should critique the book itself or the hordes of teenagers who think this series is the pinnacle of the english language. I’m going to lean in favor of reviewing the book, but the words I have for the scremaing hordes will be heard at a later date.

One of the definite problems I had with this book, character-wise, is that Bella has yet to show any decisions bearing the mark of real matury. She is making decisions that are entirely appropriate given her emotional state, but that isn’t maturity per se. I wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of this, except she is using her emotional state to decide whether she should get married or become a vampire. My review of thie final book might will expand upon this, and my review of the sereis as a whole will mkae some definite motions that way, but that’s it for today. Keep reading!

No, but I feel I need to finish the review of this series. Relax, more good stuff is coming. Besides, I like this stuff.

While some people find the idea of being a vampire attractive because of the whole immotral power badassery, its unique to find someone who would be better off as a vampire because her life is too dangerous as it is.

Consider Bella Swan, protagonist in this the second of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and nearly direct sequel to Twilight. Coming out of a summer spent with the love of her life, Edward Cullen, while recovering from her ordeal with some not-so-nice vampires at the end of the previous book, Bella is looking forward to an entire schoolyear with her true love. Despite the fact that Bella is petulantly against birthdays as rememberances of her aging against Edward’s immortality, the Cullen family throws her a birthday party at their estate just outside the small Washington town of Forks. Due to Bella’s inborn clumsiness and because the plot needs something interesting with which to drive conflict, Bella slips, cuts herself, and falls into a glass bowl, resulting in furhter lacerations. This sets up a lot, so let me repeat that: Bella (human) starts bleeding profusley in front of a family of vampires. For those of us who kept waiting for this shoe to drop, we got to have a little “I-told-you-so” moment with ourselves. One of Edward’s “brothers” and the youngest of the vampire bunch, goes blood-crazy and almost attacks Bella, while most of the rest of the family scurries off to avoid temptation. Edward and co. deflect the attack, and the good Dr. Cullen (Edward’s “father”) patches up Bella and sends her on her way.

Edward, who from roughly halfway through book one up until the end of book four (spoiler!) is deeply worried about Bella getting injured or killed just by hanging around him, and the entire family decides it would be better to just leave, despite the fact that Edward and Bella are only a minor sugery away from being attached at the hip. Bella is instantly heartbroken, in manner designed to tug at the strings of all tenn females everywhere, but which managed to warm the cold bitter heart of this college male (me). One of the only nice things about Edward and Bella’s breakup is it allows for a rather brilliantly styled time change. There are those who would say that Meyer’s use of four separate pages, each with a month name in light grey font (”October, November, December, January), is tacky and occasionally overdone. I disagree.

Edward’s (and by extension the Cullen Family’s) decision to leave Forks and Bella forever creates a moment of catharsis, of supreme emotional anguish, with no immedaite foil or relief in sight. It occurs in the first quarter of the book, and the feeling is that the book can only go downhill from here, emotionally speaking. The four-page time lapse is poetry deisguised as prose, using the minimum amount of speech to convey the most emotion. We can only take so many pages of psychological torment, especially since we’re seeing everything from Bells’ point of view. Those four pages allow our imaginations to fill in the blanks of what our protagonist must be going through, rather than just feeding us in explanation. In other words, it allows us to think as well as move the plot forward. (If anyone thinks I’m off the mark here, I would love to discuss it further, but I must go on.)

The stroy continues. Charlie, Bella’s policeman father, confronts Bella with sending her back to her mother in Florida, because he sees her so miserable in Forks. This prompts Bella to force herself back into the land of the socially active again, just so her father will let her stay close to the place where her true love once lived. Bella starts spending more time with Jacob Black, an old friend from Bella’s custody summers in Forks, and has a good time with him, but discovers another mark of her insanity – Oops, I mean, deep and abiding love for Edward. Every time she does something nail-bitingly, mind-bogglingly stupid, she hears Edward’s voice in her head telling her not to do it. Bella is by this time so desperate for any sign of Edward that she keeps doing amazingly stupid things. Like riding motorcycles, despite the fact that she has no natural balance. As well as taking her and her defenseless friend to the shadiest part of the nearest big city, in effect just asking for this book to reclassify its age level. Edward’s voice guides her through these situations, but sounds angry with her. Go figure.

I do have to say, from a reader’s perspective, and given the random vampire lore I’ve picked up over the years, I’m almost convinced by the end of the book that one of Edward’s supernatural powers (besides the mind-reading thing I keep forgetting to mention) is the ability to his voice into Bella Swan’s head.

Possibly the simultaneously most dumb and most predictable thing Bella does that qualifies as somewhat insane is start hanging out with werewolves. Yup, Jacob Black comes from a long and distinguished line of werewolves,as do most of Jacob’s friends. It comes as no surprise to the reader, given that Bella had no trouble with vampires, that she will have no trouble with werewolves. Most normal humans would be freaked out, however.

On top of all that, Bella has a vampire after her, hell-bent on revenge. That’s right, the mat of the the vampire Edward killed protecting Bella is back with a vengeance trying to kill Bella in revenge on Edward. Of course, while Bella’s furry new buddies are off trying to catch the rogue vamp, Bella decides to hear Edward in her head again by taking a little swim off a giant cliff. At which point, Edward’s fortune-telling “sister” sees what looks like Bella’s death, and Edward runs to the vampire law enforcement, the Volturi, to do something tupid enough to kill him, so that he can join Bella in death. Maybe its just my description, but this does sound a hair like a supernatural soap opera.

Bella rushes to Italy with Edward’s “sister” Alice to try and stop him, and manages to do so before they are all brought before the Volturi, who decree that Bella “knows too much” in the manner of secret societies everywhere. They make Edward promise to turn Bella into a vampire post-haste, and Edward agrees, because agreeing is so easy in the face of death. Everybody, Bella and all the Cullens, return to Forks, where Bella gets just a little more petualnt about how soon Edward will turn her, and the book ends with Jacob reminding Edward (and Bella) that the treaty between the Cullens and Jacob’s pack requires no biting, not just no killing. So, if Edward turns Bella they face a vampire-werewolf war. Skippy.

Alright, review time. As balse as I sounded about this Twilight installment, I’m still deeply fond of the series for its continued deciation to making the supernatural human, and its light supermatural appreciation of the human. There are no emotional experiences that feel contrite, and the pain that is in abundant supply in this novel feels real enough to make the reader pause and take a breat before continuing. Bella turning to another supernatural being after one breaks up with her feels, hindsight being 20/20, rather predictable, but that’s actually not a detractor here. The main detractor, for my money, is the strained love triangle that is on the rise once Edward comes back, since Jacob seems in no hurry to relinquish his feelings towards Bella. Seeing how this plays will be an interesting topic for the next review.

All in all, its a good read, obviously enough or I wouldn’t have read it. Since I haven’t mentioned it before let me ackowledge that Meyer’s writing style, while no Tolkien, really does try to bring the reader into the moment and often greatly succeeds in doing so. The series has enough momentum from this book and its predecessor that I’m hungry for more, but that will be in my review of Eclipse, so keep a weather eye.

After enjoying a summer recovering from her vampire attack at the end of the previous book, “Twilight”, Bella Swan returns to school in Forks with her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen. Since her birthday comes early in the school year, Edward’s family decides to throw her a birthday party. Predictably, her bad luck makes a quick appearance.

And that’s where I’ll have to leave it for now, folks. Got to get ready for surgery tomorrow!

The first installment in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga follows an misleadingly simple plot. Girl, daughter of divorced parents, goes to live with father in small Northwestern town. In trying to fit in in the ridiculously small high school, girl unwittingly falls for “gorgeous”, reclusive boy. Relationship develops, girl gets into trouble, boy saves girl. Simple, yes? Don’t let the plot’s simplicity fool you. The complication, in this book as in a great number literary works, comes from the nature of the work. Isabella Swan (Bella to her friends), is the ‘girl’ in this story, as well as being narrator, protagonist, and self-described as exceptionally plain. The boy she falls in love with is named Edward Cullen, member of the wealthiest and most reclusive family that inhabits the small town Bella moves to.

The character difference that Edward (and by extension his family) brings to the conflict is that they are all vampires. Bella, in the course of getting closer to Edward, discovers this, and in an almost shockingly suicidal moment (given the nature of vampires as depicted in popular culture) decides she doesn’t care and wants to be with Edward.

Let me take a moment to say that this is not an easy review to write. Especially because this will be part one of essentially four reviews, its difficult to know where to begin. This book, and indeed the entire saga, is quickly characterized and tossed away as being ‘Young Adult Fantasy Romance”, but that is far too mcuh of an over-generalization. First of all, if this is “Young Adult”, then so is the majority of all published Science Fiction and Fantasy. Just becuase the characters are depicted as being high-school age does not make it irrelevant to those of us not in high school. Its themes and character development show a promise found lacking in a great number of strictly adult fictional novels.

Second, if this is truly only a romance, then perhaps I should be reading more romances. I have read books with no romantic element what-so-ever that contain less suspense and action than Twilight. Does the book focus heavily on romance? Yes. And perhaps too much if the reader is coming from Military or Space Opera Science Fiction, where the conflicts and settings are so large that almost no chance is given for character development on a major scale.  I submit, however, that at no point is the action sacrificed for the romance.

Turning away from my defense of the story and returning to my critique, there are some very good and rather annoying things about the book. On the plus side, the book is filled with a driving tension from the moment the word ‘vampire’ is read. Reading the story, I felt like I was infinitely waiting for the other shoe to drop: a girl is deliberately choosing to spend her time with a group of people who need to suck blood, preferrably human, to stay alive. Despite the fact that Edward’s family is self-described as ‘vegetarian’ (a vampire inside joke denoting that thye only drink animal blood rather than hunt humans), the inherent horror-movie-esque strain is still there. It is relieved, somewhat at the end of the story when Bella becomes a damsel in distress at the hands of a non-’vegetarian’ vampire, but the tension is still there.

On the negative side, Bella has some truly annoying moments. For 80% of the book, her character is well-developed, realistic to a point, and likable. Towards the very end, when she seems obsessed with Edward turning her into a vampire in order to be with her forever, she cna only be described as petualnt at best. The idea of giving up her mortal life for her undead beloved is quite noble, but she seems to be blinded as to what it actually will mean. She seems more like a reckless, love-sick teen in those final moments than at any other point in the book, despite the constant descriptions of how Edward sets her knees a-tremble. Edward, at least, is fully aware of what his lifestyle means, and refuses to turn her.

Now, we’ve done a little plot summary and a little critique, so how best to wrap this up? I believe I can only say that Twilight was well worth the read, and would be for anyone who enjoys a broad spectrum of literature. It may be the hopeless romantic in me dying to get out, but I devoured this book. The dramatic tension drives you through the book, and the character development makes every page worth it. By it, spread it, and remember that love just might still be alive, even in the undead.

Also, stay tuned for my reviews of the next three books in this series, and please leave comments or questions here or in the forum at this review’s response page.