Breaking Dawn, book 3
Well, it’s been several weeks now since I finished the last Twilight book and I’m afraid I’ve just been lazy about blogging. But for the sake of completion, I really wanted to get my thoughts out about the ending. Bear with me if this is a bit vaguer than the previous posts, though.
As usual, this will contain spoilers.
The last half of Breaking Dawn returns to Bella’s point of view, starting with her transformation into a vampire. It then goes on to describe her first days in her new body, then everything goes on well for a while until Alice gets a vision of the Volturi showing up to pretty much kill them all. Then they scramble together all the vampires they know who will help them stand against the bad guys, but in the end it’s resolved peacefully and the Volturi go on their way. That’s the gist of it, anyway.
The first thing that I have to say about this section is that this is absolutely the best Bella has ever been. I’ve read some comments online where people have said that Bella becomes less easy to relate to after she becomes a vampire because she’s too perfect. I disagree. I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t find human!Bella particularly relatable (as I’m not a braindead, hormonal moron), so really just about anything was going to be an improvement. Although I think that the fact that she becomes a more grounded character is because of three things that happen at nearly the same time: 1) She becomes a vampire. Yes, that’s the obvious one. She loses her klutziness and, more importantly, stops getting in life-threatening danger every five seconds, because she’s now a super-powerful vampire who’s actually stronger than even the strongest of the Cullens (due to the whole ‘newborn vampires are freakishly strong’ thing). Which means that it would be especially hard to find anything that would actually be a danger to her, so for her to intentionally seek some out would be a challenge (although now would have been a lovely time to go cliff diving). 2) She becomes a mother. Really, I think this is possibly the most important improvement to her character. It redirects her focus away from single-minded devotion to Edward. Desperation to keep her child safe is much more understandable to me than desperation to keep safe a guy who is infinitely more powerful and better able to take care of himself than she was (as a human). Once the child, Renesmee, enters the picture, it just seems like Bella becomes more aware of the rest of the members of the family, and actually acknowledges the fact that there is more to life than being in love with Edward. 3) She’s married to Edward now, so the sexual tension is pretty much gone. Because when they get all hot for each other (metaphorically, of course, as they’re both like living ice statues now), rather than getting all angsty and going through the whole, “Oh, no, we shouldn’t. Oh, I can’t touch you,” etc., they simply have sex, then they move on to other things. Sure, a lot of people would say the breakdown of that tension ruins the heart of the story, but as that was never a part of the story I liked, getting over it was a relief. Actually, there’s a fourth reason, as well. 4) She’s over Jacob, so the love triangle aspect is gone. Again, some would complain about that, but all I wanted for those three from the beginning of New Moon was for everyone to just get along, so I was very pleased when they finally did. So, yes, in my opinion, vampire!Bella is a far more sympathetic, far more rational, far more relatable character than human!Bella.
Another thing I really liked about this part of the book was the continuing abundance of Cullens. Because, yeah, they’re cool, and I like reading about them. And seeing them, from Bella’s POV, as her equals rather than as untouchable god-like figures was nice. Also, we get to see a whole bunch of other vampires. We’ve seen other vampires before, of course, but most of them have been evil. Here we get a nice range, from the Denali clan (who are the only other “vegetarian” vampires, and call themselves the original succubi), to the various nomads, to the kind of hilarious ancient vamps that Jacob fondly refers to as “Dracula One and Dracula Two”. I was surprised to find how much I liked many of these. The element-controlling Egyptian lad, Benjamin, was very pleasant, Kate of the Denali was highly amusing, Garrett the nomad was just plain awesome, and all the others were a nice addition. It was a great way to show us the wider world of this Twilight-verse. Oh, and I’m now a total Kate/Garrett shipper.
There are a lot of other things I’d like to address, but I think I’ll save them for a different post in which I plan to address the major criticisms this book gets and share my take on them. For now, I’ll just close by saying that Breaking Dawn was my favorite of the four. It kept me engaged all the way through, it never frustrated me with characters acting stupid, and I was very pleased with the way it ended. Which is far more than I can say for Deathly Hallows.
