Twilight of Bookmonkey: Day Six

Currently I’m just over 320 pages into New Moon. Unlike the first book, which I consider a pretty okay Young Adult supernatural romance novel, this book is pretty weak.

Basically Edward, who spent the entire first book saying “I’m no good for you baby, maybe I should go...” finally makes good on his promise and leaves. After this we are left with Bella whining unendingly about the “hole in her chest” that was torn out when Edward left. She doesn’t do anything for months... literally, there is a chunk of the book with chapter headings and nothing else, explaining that as time went by nothing happened.

You know, I don’t mind reading books where very little happens, but absolutely nothing? And worse yet, nothing narrated by an incredibly self-involved teenaged girl. I’m doing my best to give this series a fair shake, but this book is really testing me.

Here are my main problems so far

1) Bella is not scared of her boyfriend. The fact that Bella has absolutely no fear of Edward or any other member of his family has effectively de-fanged these vampires. If they don’t scare a teenaged girl, they can’t really be that scary. (I will note that if Bella was scared of Edward and loved him anyway the book would have unfortunate parallels to Domestic Violence so I don’t have a better solution for this.)

2) Not a lot is happening in book two – Bella is sad, and hundreds of pages go by while she acts like a jerk to everyone around her.

3) There are no “on-screen” fight scenes. Both the fight between James and the Cullens in Twilight and the fight between Laurent and the Werewolves in New Moon happen away from our narrator so we only hear about them after the fact.

Here is what I like so far

1) Charlie Swan. Bella’s dad and the Chief of police in the town of Forks seems like a pretty cool guy working with a very difficult daughter. I wish I could bake the guy a cake and say, Don’t worry man, some of us see how great a Dad you are.

Coming up this weekend, I start Eclipse and check out the first movie – Horay!