Goodreads Review: Breaking Dawn

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Phoebe 3288 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2010%2F07%2F07%2Fgoodreads-review-breaking-dawn%2FGoodreads+Review%3A+Breaking+Dawn2010-07-07+04%3A56%3A42Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebeeating.com%2F%3Fp%3D328

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ho boy.

So I mildly enjoyed the first two books in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series–enough that I considered myself somewhat of a Twilight apologist. No, no, I tried to convince the naysayers, she’s really not all bad! Though I found Twilight and New Moon to be deeply flawed, I also thought that Meyer had her finger right on the pulse of adolescent melancholy. What Bella’s story may have lacked in feminist leanings, it made up for in rich setting and earnestness, if nothing else. I didn’t quite like them enough to buy Eclipse, but when a friend offered to lend me the massive tome that is Breaking Dawn, I figured it wouldn’t kill me to give it a try.

Well. Um. Hmm.

I’ll say that, like the series it concludes, Breaking Dawn starts with some promise. Whiny McWhinerston Bella Swann is angsting over her impending shotgun marriage to vampire Edward. It’s an act that’s largely a technicality for her–something she grudgingly plans to endure so she can get laid and get some superpowers. While I found this model of dealmaking-in-the-place-of-compromise in an adult relationship a bit troublesome, I also found most of the sentiment honest. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t raise a stink about my sugar daddy buying me a Mercedes (or is it a Beemer? Whatever), but as a recently-married type, I empathized.

But then Bella gets hitched and the book completely falls apart. And we’re only an eighth of the way in to this door-stopper of a dud.

I don’t really want to rehash all the plot points here, no matter how cringe worthy they are and how easy it would be to play them for laughs (yes, the childbirth scene is the first that pushes this series into horror; yes, Bella sucks at naming children). What I want, instead, is to talk a little about the overarching theme here–how Bella is the best, how her life is the best, and how everything falls into place around her–and why it didn’t resonate with me.

I say this as a woman married to her first serious boyfriend, who she met at eighteen: I think Bella’s story does a disservice to young wives. It certainly does one to young mothers. Not to mention anyone who has ever actually been a corner of a love triangle.

I understand that these books are meant to be wish-fulfillment, but by making Bella’s life so utterly perfect and utterly easy, Meyer fails to acknowledge life’s actual complexities and pains–and so the joy found here is pretty shallow. Nothing is earned. Nothing is lost. The stakes are so low as to be non-existent. We know that nothing bad will happen to anyone because Meyer shows us again and again that Forks is really some sort of fluffy-cloud heaven. And so the final, patched-together plot, building only over the last two hundred pages, has no urgency at all. I’ll admit it: I skimmed. So sue me.

She could have, instead, given us something honest and bittersweet, a story of love and loss and growing older–because really, in not-so-many metaphorical words, that should be what Bella’s marriage, motherhood, and subsequent vampirism represent. Sure, have Bella choose Edward, choose her child–but let’s talk honestly about what these choices usually mean for women like Bella, what they have to sacrifice to make their young families work, what they lose, and what they gain, in becoming fully-fledged women so young.

Instead, Meyer chooses to lock her characters in a hellish fantasy of perpetual childhood–maybe this is what she meant by the Millay line at the front of the book? In the place of genuine tenderness or beauty, she gives us the saccharine (Bella and her daughter’s flawless and unearned perfection), the unbelievable (Charlie’s reaction to . . . everything), and the bizarre (pedophiliac imprinting).

But perhaps worst of all is the writing, the truly terrible writing. And by the end of this novel it really is–truly–terrible. It’s a slow slide into poopy prose; thanks to a middle-eight spent in the narrative clutches of Jacob, whose voice is far less assuming and much more casual, it’s easy to forget even the descriptive potential that Breaking Dawn revealed in the first few hundred pages. Forks is, at a time when it should be completely immersive, suddenly rendered in flat, lifeless terms. Description and narration are all pushed aside for cutesy dialog. Two passages near the end–one slightly hackneyed extended metaphor where Bella’s life is likened to a quilt, and another, where her brand new Thomas-Kinkade-calendar-esque cottage in the woods is described–stand out for not being completely awful.

Seriously, the novel’s last third was so poorly written and so unbelievable that I couldn’t help but grope for some sort of explanation. I mean, we weren’t really meant to believe this, were we, much less find it good?

So I’d like to suggest an alternative reading–one that seems quite a bit more palatable to me, and a bit more believable. Bella actually dies permanently in childbirth. The last third is her bardo fantasy before she can move on to the next spiritual plane (thanks for the idea, LOST writers). That’s why it’s so goddamned weird! In the real world, the baby goes on a rampage–killing Rosalie first, then savaging the other vampires. Against all odds Jacob and Edward are able to band together to stop and kill the monstrous being. Of course, once this happens, Edward asks Jacob to end his life. He does, sorrowfully, laying Edward to rest beside his child bride. And he’s about to end his own when Leah Clearwater appears to suggest that maybe they should try to face the future together. He may be mourning; she may be sterile. But they still have free will and can still choose life with an equal, could still choose love.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a bittersweet ending.

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