Breaking Dawn

#316
Title: Breaking Dawn
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Year: 2008
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
756 pages

For a while I thought Meyer was going to pull this off. Early in the book I could see plot and structural elements that she had set up hundreds of pages before, and I was hopeful. However, this 4th installment in the Twilight series is the weakest of the group. The major flaws are these:

• The shift to Jacob's perspective was jarring and serves as an example of clumsy expository technique. Unfortunately, Jacob's voice is so much more interesting than Bella's that her return as narrator is disappointing.
• Meyer seems to be trying to respond to criticism of Bella's passivity and Edward's controlling by going to the opposite extreme. Edward and others wring their hands while Bella, aided by Rose, gets what she wants, putting just about everyone at grave risk.
• Dull writing, dull, overinclusive detail, and dull interpersonal interactions pull the book's potential away from innovation and solidly toward the romantic beach reading genre.
• Bella's fierce longing for Edward is almost immediately supplanted by her fierce longing for Renesmee (perhaps the ugliest name I've encountered in all of fantasy and science fiction). Yes, she is supposed to be even hotter for Edward afterward, but the assertion falls very flat because is is unsupported emotionally.
• There are too many unsupported plot thread resolutions and too many inconsequential red herrings. This is not a tightly-woven narrative.
• The showdown with the Volturi is about as well written as J. K. Rowling's worst run-on Quidditch scene.

It's too bad that this series has garnered so much adulation when there are better teen vampire books out there. I can only hope the appeal is the sentimentality, or the message about teens not having sex until they're married, and not a cultural return to women as objects--which for all the assertions about Bella as subject, is largely what she remains.