Twilight Part 4: A Kiss on the Ec-lips-e

While the title may potentially give the illusions I enjoyed this book, sadly, it was more just an excuse for a semi-clever-but-not-really pun.

I was promised better. Everyone said, this book is a step up from the last two.

Guess what? Everyone’s a liar. And not a very good one. Like this book. Not a very good book.

Eclipse, as mentioned, is the the third book in the series, is all about choice. Bella, having fallen in love in the first book, then fallen in friend in the second, is faced with the inevitable decision that must be made between the two.

And said friend makes this annoying by wanting to be all lovey and stuff.

I didn’t actually mind reading this ‘novel’ – to begin with. The first half manages to add a bit of character to the previously established mannequins with names. Most book series tend to do this in the first book but I get the feeling that Twilight is the rebellious teenage daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Literature who adamantly opposes being, well, any good.

Twilight. The Barabara Bush of literature.

 

Surprisingly, I found myself intrigued to see where the story will go now that there were actual characters to relate to.

Unfortunately, turns out one of those characters is desperate to be a douche.

I mentioned I didn’t mind the first half. The second half actually made me want to put the book down and give up on this excursion altogether.

Why? A distinctly questionable moral compass.

The first half doesn’t even try to hide the Christian undertones. The vampire boyfriend won’t have sex or turn Bella into a vampire until they are married (metaphor at this point discarded for obviousness).

Then some bad vampires show up. End first half.

Second half moral lesson #1 – If people are bad, feel free to masacre them.

The series makes a point of establishing that vampires aren’t mindless killing machines and are capable of love and friendship and other things that only girls really want to read about.

How come, then, no one bats an eyelid about brutally killing hordes of young, sentient beings? In fact, they take joy in it. But make sure not to have pre-marital relations. That’s just wrong.

Second half moral lesson #2 – Emotional blackmail = Love success

The werewolf best friend finally gets Bella to kiss him after threatening to kill himself. Through that, she realises that she loves him too. How sweet.

Wait. What?

I’m sure this is the kind of message you really don’t want to be putting into the minds of pre-teen girls.

Single guys, however, turns out this is totally the way to go about getting that girl you were always keen on but that openly rejected you even after you tried to force your mouth onto her lips (see chapter 15).

I can suck my own lips thank you very much

Also, common complaints with the entire series in general.

Firstly, people can do more than just ‘purse’ their lips. Go buy a thesaurus.

Secondly, you know how the superpower of mind-reading is the most unrealistic and unhelpful superpower ever due to the fact that a person’s thought process is typically a convuluted strain of random ideas wandering off at various tangents and couldn’t possible be even slightly interpreted? It would be like listening to a crowd of people all saying reasonably similar things but never the same thing. Sure some are shouting but it’s hard to make out what they’re saying over the buzz of even the quietest whisperers.

I hope I explained that well enough.

Anyway, the whole book could be substantially shorter if, as it is told in first person, the author concentrated on thoughts that were actually important and not the random trains of thought that seem to take up about two-thirds of each story.

What the book ends up being is every little detail that she’s thinking as she’s thinking it. The vampire boyfriend is so lucky that he can’t read her mind because, even if he can (unrealistically) filter out the crap, he’s still going to be left with fecal matter.

Why the heck would I put up a picture of poo!? You all know what it looks like.

So, one more book to go. Amanda hasn’t finished reading it yet so it might take a while for my next review. Luckily (?) the New Moon movie is out this week so I may as well cover that.

Zach

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~ by zachjacobsen on November 17, 2009.