Oh, Breaking Dawn, how you ruined Stephenie Meyer’s captivating series about vegetarian vampires and teen love. Your writing is erratic, you’re about 300 pages too long, your characters do things out of character, you introduce so many new characters in so little space that you needed to add a chart to keep them straight, you contain numerous detail errors that we won’t get into, and you forgot to include the dramatic plot point. It’s too bad. I really enjoyed the series and I feel like this one ruined it for me, leaving a sour taste in my mouth for the whole thing. If this had been the first book in the series, I would have skipped the rest. But I see now I’m not the only person who feels this way; countless readers and critics have wondered what the hell Meyer was thinking. I’ll do my best to keep this short.On the most basic level, Breaking Dawn just didn’t hold my interest. The hardback copy I have is 754 pages long, and not surprisingly, it’s filled with a lot of rambling. For the most part, readers seem to realize that this series is not an example of good writing. It’s simple and Meyer relies on a lot of elementary adjectives and adverbs, instead of building unique prose. And that’s okay; the appeal of this series, I think, has always been the personal relationships: the love and tension between Bella and Edward; the confusion between Bella and Jacob; the competition between Jacob and Edward; the family dynamics between the Cullens and Bella. So then in Breaking Dawn, when Meyer abandons the relationships that have pushed the story forward, she creates a vacuum. In the fourth book, Edward is a fairly hollow character and there’s little interaction between him and Bella; Jacob and Edward are now buddies so there’s no rivalry; Jacob imprints on Renesmee early, so there’s no romantic tension left. Without these propelling winds that have kept the series going, Breaking Dawn just flounders on the rocks.
Personally, I was surprised that Bella became a vampire; I actually thought, at the end of the last book, that Edward would give her up and she would mate with Jacob. Oops. But she became a vampire and that’s Meyer’s choice and I don’t really object to it. But my issue here with Breaking Dawn was that in Bella’s conversion, basic vampire lore got thrown out the window. Obviously Meyer was already pushing the boundaries with the vegetarian Cullens, and that’s fine; she took a standard legend and transformed it into something original. The Cullens by nature want to drink human blood, and even though they resist, it’s a constant struggle – that’s transforming legend into your own. But it seems ludicrous to write a story about vampires and then ignore their basic characteristics, like she does with Bella post-transformation. Vampires drink human blood; that is what makes them vampires, by definition. But vampire Bella isn’t really interested in humans; she has super-duper control over her emotions (which is amazing, considering she was 100% emotionally driven as a mortal). Bella doesn’t struggle, and after three books of prepping us for her newborn struggle, it’s like what the hell? when nothing actually happens. As Edward tells her, “You shouldn’t be able to do any of this. You shouldn’t be so…so rational.” Wise words, Eddie. Unfortunately no one was listening.
I looked at Stephenie Meyer’s FAQs on her website, and I found the last sentences of the defense of the book interesting: “The surprise to me is that so many people do like my books. I wrote them for a very specific audience of one, and so there was no guarantee that any other person on the planet besides me would enjoy them.” I am pretty well convinced at this point that Meyer is living out a dream-fantasy, with herself as Bella, as she’s writing these books. As such, she doesn’t want to transform that into something horrific...which is where the unbelievable plot turns emerge from. Take away the vampires and the story becomes clear: A mousy girl moves to a strange new town where she suddenly becomes the most popular girl in school; the most gorgeous, amazing guy in the world falls in love with her and through this love, she transforms into the most beautiful, powerful woman the world has ever seen. I get that it’s a fantasy to have Bella emerge as the vampire with the strongest powers, who becomes the only one who can save the Cullens' way of life, after she’s been the weakest link…but this turn of events doesn’t really fit within the framework Meyer’s created over the last three books. And because Meyer knows this manuscript isn’t going to be sitting a drawer, for her own personal use, I do think she has a responsibility to the reader to stay on course. And Breaking Dawn just doesn’t do that. It veers. Oh, how it veers.
In the end, though, I have the same problem with this that I did with the last Harry Potter book: These final installments fail because their protagonists don’t learn anything. Both Harry and Bella go through an epic battle and yet they come out on the other side completely the same, as if nothing had ever happened. Look at The Lord of the Rings – Frodo dumps the ring in Mount Doom, yes, but he can't be the same. He won, but he lost, because he has to leave Middle Earth. He literally can't go back to his old way of life – and that’s what gives that book its heft. There are consequences, for both good and evil. But in the Harry Potter and Twilight series, risk means nothing because the enemy is vanquished and nothing of that struggle remains. Here in Twilight, you've been told over three books that there's supposed to be some struggle/conflict in becoming a vampire – some struggle in staying yourself – but in the end, Meyer skips it...because didn't you know, becoming a vampire is like, the most awesomest thing, way better than being who you were before? It comes out of left field and that, in the end, is what makes the series end flatly.
