I. The Beginning of Days
Oct. 9th, 2009 05:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkmoreno
"Entering the arena first, is the challenger! From San Jose, California, weighing in at none of your damn business. Representing Team Sea Slug ... J.K. MORENO! And his opponent ... from the mind and pen of Stephenie Meyer, weighing in at 536 pages. Representing Team Twilight ... the current and defending Internet Heavyweight Champion of the Internet ... the former New York Times and USA Today best-selling book, NEW MOON!"
GAME ON!
Let me start off right now by reiterating that I am not a Twilight fan, or even much of a fan of vampires as a genre or element or whatever. I'm not going to heap hate where it's not deserved, but I'm not going to heap love either. My business is to entertain myself and entertain you, not to prove why this is or is not a good book. To sum up, I'm doing this for a few main reasons.
1) Morbid Curiosity. As much as this has been talked about and mocked and so forth, I simply had to sample it for myself before I got too free with the mocking. I can hate on the homogenization of vampires and werewolves, and thumb my nose at how it's basically a glorified self-insert fanfiction, but if I do that just on the strength of hearsay it wouldn't be fair. After this project, I can confidently say "I read it, and it homogenizes vampires and werewolves and reads like a glorified self-insert fanfic" if that ends up what I get out of it. From my research, it also seems to be considered the strongest book of the series overall, and while I figure some will probably say that the last two books are better, it doesn't change the fact that New Moon is what I have on my mouse pad right now.
2) Interest And Fun. With the trailers that have been liberally sprinkled on the Internet since August and other such promotion for the movie release in November, this is probably the book that people will be talking about for a while, if they haven't already. Probably by the time I'm done with this, they'll be talking about Eclipse since that movie is allegedly already filming, or about Breaking Dawn since people are already pushing for that movie to be made.
3) For The Ladies. Yeah, just like the same reason Mike Smith started Mike Smith vs. the Half-Blood Prince, one of my motivations for doing this is that it will amuse women, whether they're my friends or not. I already know it'll potentially amuse one, so I guess so far I'm batting a thousand.
As I stated in the intro, I'm reviewing this on a chapter-by-chapter basis, partially to challenge myself since usually I'll blow through a book rapidly, and partially because I happen to like that format and think it works, so why fix it? Maybe the book would have been better if Stephenie Meyer had taken that approach to her vampires and werewolves, but we'll never know. I also realize I forgot to cover the scale, which I will rectify now.
In homage to Mike Smith's Airi Masaki Scale, I give you the Sakaki-San Scale. When a chapter is GOOD, you get the girls of Class 3 smiling and happy. Sure, there's more than Sakaki-san in there, but the picture just looks so positive I had to use it, and it's the best picture of Sakaki-san smiling I found in Google Image Searching. In contrast, when a chapter is BAD, poor Sakaki-san gets bitten by Kamineko. It's already happened too much in the series, so hopefully New Moon will surprise me and I'll have happy schoolgirls to see me through this. Of course, I'm not holding my breath.
That seems to cover everything, so let's get this train wreck a-rolling!
CHAPTER ZERO: PRE-READ EXPERIENCE (My Title: "Mother One: Pre-Read Experience)
Yeah, Mike Smith does this bit, but damn it, I like it too! Points to anyone who gets the reference, cause they'll know what I've been watching on Youtube lately.
To truly begin the pre-read experience, we have to go back to about a month or so ago. This was when my lightened schedule at work really began to lighten, almost too much. I was home more than working for the first time in years, and while I was enjoying the time to myself, I did eventually start to get a bit bored. One night who should call me up out of the blue but Amanda Dalton, cause she had something for me and felt like going out for pearl drinks. Well, I certainly couldn't say no, so after a shower and a short wait, she was at my house and we were off.
The conversation was good, as always, and talk of this project came up at one point. It was a bit later that she revealed what she had for me. See, I had helped to pay for repairs on her computer some time ago (I honestly forget when, other than it being sometime in 2007 or 2008) and told her not to worry about paying me back anytime soon. Not long ago, she managed to land a job in her chosen career, which despite being pretty stressful at times is paying well. After paying off overdue bills, she decided that next bit of payback was going to be directed to me, and I found myself with $200. When I got home, I decided that I would spend part of that money to buy New Moon and make this project a reality.
A week or so later, I went into my local Barnes and Noble, an institution that probably has taken something close to a thousand dollars from me over the years in manga and Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, determined to get the book. By "the book", I mean Abyss by Troy Denning, the latest book in the Fate of the Jedi series, which I had discovered was released the month before and completely forgot to grab. Once I got that, I figured I'd get this book too.
The book then spent a few weeks sitting on my couch, where I was too busy either reading Abyss, which is a very good book, or playing JRPGs or flash games, or talking with Heatherface. Finally, probably out of sleep deprivation and hunger, I decided to finally give it a once over.
The cover is very spartan, a sleek black overall with the picture of what appears to be a bloodstained flower shedding a petal. Note that the only reason I think the flower is bloodstained is that vampires are an element in this series. I could be wrong, cause I don't practice ikebana. I know it means something, or at least assume so since the covers of Twilight and Breaking Dawn do, and I'm guessing it has something to do with love, judging from the blurb on the back. Speaking of that, if you look just below ...
"Legions of readers are hungry for more. Give in to temptation. . . ."
Credit for trying to come up with a different way to say "Lots of people read this book and want more, you should too!" but it sounds less like sharing a literary phenomenon and more like recruiting for a cult. Considering that people were paying as high as $380 for advance copies, I almost have to wonder if the bar wasn't set a little too high on this one. I could list other examples that make the Twilight Saga seem like it should be chilling with Batman's rogues' gallery in Arkham, but I'll let it go for now, I guess.
There's also a table of contents, an addition that I suspect is to make it a little more accessible to the younger ones, but I like it too. While usually I read too fast to count but generally have a good memory about whatever page I left off on, this takes out the guesswork when I can't remember and lost my bookmark somewhere. Not to mention that I didn't know how many ratings this would ultimately get without counting chapters, and using a table of contents is infinitely easier than thumbing through and counting how many times I see "Chapter ##" or looking at the end to see what number it leaves off on. Stephenie Meyer also dedicated the book to her father, and opened with an excerpt from a scene from Romeo and Juliet. A little cliche, but overall I like it okay.
RATING: GOOD!
In a sense, it's pretty eye-catching when your book is black against the usually more colorful things you find in the Teens section. It also helps when the mother and daughter who were in the section at the time didn't bat an eye at a slightly haggard-looking guy picking up that book. While I may be the kind of guy who's secure enough in his manhood to buy feminine products if called on to do so, I'll admit that I'm relieved when others don't make a big deal of it. Black is my favorite color anyhow, so I'll go ahead and give it a pass here. Even if it's a book I don't like, it's a good-looking book I don't like, and I can appreciate that for what its worth.
PREFACE/CHAPTER ONE: PARTY (My Title: It's My Party And I Can Bitch If I Want To)
The preface is only two pages long, so no sense giving it its own section. It's pretty easily summed up as someone in the first person (whom I assume is our heroine, Isabella Marie Swan) relating some event or another as if it were a nightmare where you're running for your life. Except it's not a dream, and Bella's running for something more precious cause her life had no meaning. Someone named Alice said it was very likely they would both (Bella and Alice, or some other pairing?) die there if they weren't trapped by sunlight, but Bella basically decides she fails at life and that's that. Either this is relating something that happened in the last book, or something that will happen later in this book, but I find myself not really caring. The preface would have gotten a BAD for it, but that would just be mean, and I'm suppoed to be entertaining, not mocking. Just know as far as openings go, this one blows so far because I see no real reason why I should care about Bella failing at life or why that should be considered dramatic. Maybe the first chapter will shed some light on this.
Reading the first couple of paragraphs though, I take it back. Bella is apparently "ninety-nine point nine percent sure" that she was, in fact, dreaming. So either this is a different dream, or Bella just killed the point of the preface. I knew going into this that the story would be told from the first-person perspective, so I figured I'd have to adjust my expectations to accomodate the viewpoint of an eighteen-year-old high school girl, and I know some women much older with more disjointed thought processes. Still, it does mess with the cohesion of the book.
Anyhow, what makes Bella so sure she's dreaming is that she sees the sun which never shines on Forks, Washington (a joke which I always thought was against Seattle, but since I don't live there what the hell does J.K. Mo know?) and because she sees her dead grandma. There's a little exposition about her dead grandma's appearance, looking just the same as Bella remembers her of course, and Bella thinks for a moment about asking her questions like I suspect most people who see dearly departed relatives in their dreams would do. Before she actually does, in comes someone that Bella recognizes by voice. Someone whose voice she would know and respond to whether she was awake, asleep, or even dead. Someone she'd walk through fire for! From parts unknown, weight unknown ... EDWARD!
I seriously wonder if any woman I know ever seriously thought of their boyfriends in terms like those when they were eighteen. Or even seriously thought of anything in those terms, ever. Ladies, if you're reading this, leave a comment and let me know while I pry a foot from our heroine's mouth.
Bella immediately has a bit of a panic attack, because even though she's sure she's dreaming, she thinks her grandma would disapprove of her being in love with a vampire, and for now nobody knows. If she's even half as florid in reality as she is in her so-called dream, I'm pretty sure everybody does know and is just good at hiding it, but again ... first person, adjust expectations. This is notable because here lies the first mention of how vampires and sunlight work in the Twilightverse. Specifically, "the brilliant sunbeams were shattering off his skin into a thousand rainbow shards like he was made of crystal or diamond."
Now, I'm going to do my best to let slide the fact that vampires in the Twilightverse are different from vampires in Everyotherverse, because in my research I learned that Stephenie Meyer did not do -her- research, she just cobbled it up from a dream and by the time she thought to do it, she had her characters locked in and couldn't change things up. It's the flat out easiest complaint one can make about the Twilight Saga, so to mock sparkly vampires shows little imagination. However, here I think I'll make an exception. How in the heck does sparkliness automatically equate to vampirism? Is that common knowledge in the Twilightverse vampire mythos? Granted, I can't think of any other plausible reason the sun would reflect off of a normal human being in that matter, but if I were to see someone sparkle like that, I'd probably think of a kaleidoscope before I think of a vampire. Then again, since vampire is defined as "the reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep", obviously some reclassification is necessary.
Hilariously enough to me, vampire is also defined as "a woman who exploits and ruins her lover", so at least for the rest of this chapter I might think of Bella being just that to Edward. How's that for OTP?
A little more exposition, explaining that Edward was in the rainiest place in the world (again, thought that was Seattle) so he could be out in the daytime without revealing that vampires are really just wannabe bishonen, that Edward has the power to read minds, and that Bella is apparently immune to that power. Insert your Mary Sue jokes in my comments. Then apparently the dream turns into a nightmare, as Bella realizes she was not looking at her dead grandma, but in a mirror, at an "ancient, creased, and withered" version of herself. Edward was beside her with no reflection, which is at least one more thing Twilightverse vampires have in common with real, better vampires, and gives her a kiss and says "Happy birthday."
Bella wakes, which I guess confirms the whole thing was a dream, and laments her birthday as if she were already over the hill. No, she laments it because she's eighteen now, and to her, Edward never will be. That makes no sense to me, because it isn't as if Edward is forever young here. Sure, he stopped aging biologically, but aging is not solely a biological process. You'd have to think that the guy might have been around for a good many years and is probably far older, mentally at least, than all his classmates. According to his Wiki page, Edward was born in 1901, so that lends credence to my theory, but again, this is the Twilightverse we're talking about here, so we're not operating on any sort of logical comparison
You know, cracking pro wrestling jokes at this does kinda make it tolerable. I see the fun in it now.
After some more discussion in which Alice is throwing a birthday party over Bella's objections and Edward maneuvers her into attending, we learn that Bella wants to be a vampire and Edward's against it. Bella can't see what's so great about mortality, which when compared with immortality and a forever with Edward, I could sort of understand, especially since so far the Cullens seem like good people. I'm sure Edward has his reasons, though.
So on to more minutae, and apparently Edward worked some magic with the female administrators so that he and Bella would have almost all their classes together. Since Bella pointed out "female" administrators, I have to assume he bamboozled them with his looks, or whored himself out. Sadly I can't picture the latter, cause this book is meant for younger people and only with a basis in reality is the latter remotely applicable. We learn about how the bit players in this saga have paired up and broken up, which I'm going to guess will matter very little later on. Most importantly, we learn about what Bella's plans for after high school are.
Plan A) Become a vampire and presumably spend eternity with Edward
Plan B) Go to college and presumably continue her education
It's right about here that I lose a lot of respect for Bella as a character, which doesn't endear me to the fact that I am still at the beginning of the book and could potentially lose even more. Sure, I know for a fact that some seventeen and eighteen-year old girls have thought this way about their boyfriends. However, what about becoming a vampire really precludes her from going to college? I guess the whole sparkly sun thing would be a detriment and I doubt there's a college in Forks she could go to, but what I can't stomach is that she would actually prioritize becoming a vampire to link herself with Edward over going to college and making something for herself. Perhaps I'm just reading too much into this, and forgetting that there are some women out there who aspire to be more or less like some old sitcom wives, or Marge Simpson, and be the best damn homemakers ever. There's really nothing wrong with that ... I just don't see a lot of -right- to it in this day and age. Gotta remember ... Twilightverse.
We go from this to more interplay between our star-crossed lovers and more birthday bitching from Bella. I use the term "star-crossed" lovers for a reason, for they're going to Bella's to watch Romeo and Juliet, cause Bella needs to watch it for English class/watch it so she can get out of the party Alice is planning. I'm going to sidestep most of this because I just ate. The conversation later turns to vampire suicide, or apparently that it's far more difficult than human suicide. Understandably, Bella is not enjoying that particular topic. Apparently something had put Bella's life in great danger in the last book, as Bella reflects about James, a sadistic vampire who wanted to torture her to death. My research already turned up who he is, so no need to go into his story since Bella isn't offering it up. This leads into the discussion of what Edward's contingency plan was if he couldn't save Bella. Specifically, he was going to commit suicide.
...
You know what, forget it, I think I've beaten that horse enough for one sitting. Just know that his plan to do it was to go to Italy to see the Volturi, who are apparently like badass vampire royalty or something and are likely capable of killing one somehow. Bella's reaction is predictable: you're not allowed to hurt yourself because what can I do without you? Thankfully we're saved from more fueling the emo fire by the arrival of Charlie, Bella's father and police chief extraordinaire. Edward asks to borrow Bella for the evening, which gives Bella the chance to hope that maybe Charlie will say no and she can escape the party. Instead, Bella loses because the Mariners are playing the Sox. Which Sox is not specified, so I'll just say that it's the 2007 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox. That sounds like a good ball game to me. While it may seem insensitive to blow off your daughter's birthday for a baseball game, I bet he's in on the party plan too. Bella does mention that he likes Alice and is grateful to her for helping Bella through what Bella calls an "awkward convalescence". Seems like something he'd do. Now let's get to the party.
The party so far seems to be as wonderful as any self-respecting girl would want for her eighteenth, which means of course Bella hates the crap out of it. Dr. Carlisle Cullen, the head of the family, apologized for not being able to rein Alice in, and his wife Esme greets Bella warmly. Here we meet the other Cullen family members, who have been hinted at before. Emmett, who the schoolkids considered to be creepy, seems to have a bit of appreciable snark. Rosalie, the obviously impossibly beautiful sister who thinks Bella is an intrusion into their life, and Jasper, who stays away because he can't resist the powerful scent of Bella's blood. Yeah, I forgot to cover this: the Cullen family are the vampire equivalent of vegetarians, only drinking animal blood rather than human. Jasper, apparently, is having some difficulty adjusting to that, though I wonder whether it's only because he hasn't been trying as long or because we need to establish that Bella('s blood) is like concentrated super pheromones.
Finally we get to presents, and not a moment too soon, because it means maybe we'll stop alternating between exposition and bitching. In fact, the way Bella put it, she "put on her best martyr face" which suggests that even though she spent some pages complaining about her birthday and presents and how she didn't want anybody to give her anything (which Charlie and her mother, Renee, cheerfully ignored), maybe she does appreciate it after all. Indeed, she seems genuinely happy when Emmett, Rosalie, and Jasper bought her ... a box which apparently had a car stereo at one point, but doesn't because, presumably due to either Super Vampire Foresight or Bella's bitching to this point, Alice explains that Emmett's already installing it and tells her what she can do with her objection. Since Bella can link this to some of that interplay with Edward in the truck earlier, she accepts graciously, almost happily.
Now it's time for Bella to open the present Alice and Edward got for her, after one more glare at Edward because apparently he promised not to spend any money on a gift for her, forcing Edward to explain that he didn't spend a dime. We never get to find out what that present is, because she suffers a paper cut that oozes a tiny drop of blood. Under normal circumstances, this is nothing, but she's in a house full of vampires and, as previously established, Bella's blood is like crystal meth and crack of the highest purity. So one tiny drop is enough for Jasper to go apeshit, though the way it writes, Edward shoves Bella out of the way, then Jasper tries to go through Edward to get to her, which forces Emmett to jump in and hold him back. The problem here is that when Edward shoved Bella, Bella went crashing into a table full of presents, cake, and glass plates. Glass plates which are now shattered under Bella, and since she threw out her arms to break her fall, they're cut up. Cue the deer in headlights stare when she realizes she's bleeding and surrounded by "six suddenly ravenous vampires", and cue the end of this chapter.
Now, I know that New Moon wasn't originally in Stephenie Meyer's plans unlike how J.K. Rowling had planned her seven-book series, so this book can be forgiven for not being much of a link to Twilight, especially because she originally had something else in mind for a follow up based on hundred-page epilogues she wrote. However, as a result, it makes some of the characters come off a little flat. Other than her birthday hatred, Bella completely revolves around Edward. Other than his vampire heritage and the Twilightverse vampires' Most Common Superpower, Edward completely revolves around Bella. Kill one and the other will go nuts and die if they had it their way. In every romance novel I've ever read, the male and female leads have well-developed personalities. they have lives that exist independent from one another, and part of the development of the burgeoning relationship is watching how those lives clash with one another until they ultimately integrate. Here, we get none of that. Maybe I needed to have read Twilight to understand how all this came about, but they could have recapped.
As openings go, this falls flat to me. Bella comes across as superficial because everything she is revolves around Edward. Edward comes off worse because he ties himself so firmly to Bella. I find myself liking the other characters more because they actually seem to have some defining traits that allow them to stand on their own two feet. The only story told here is that Bella and Edward are so in love, with no real explanation why beyond superficial reasons such as Edward's impossible looks or Bella's impossible blood. This is supposed to be a breathtaking romance? Please tell me there's something I should be liking about these two.
Hope you like. Leave comments. If you're commenting anonymously, lemme know who you are and where you found me from.
COMING NEXT SCENE: Let's Play Trauma Center! Suture in a zig-zag pattern!
