I am in no way looking forward to this. I promised myself I'd read all the Twilight books just to be able to say I've read them once, but god they're such a plotless slog to get through. Spoilers ahead. Content warnings for anti-Native racism and pedophilia mentions apply.
After Edward leaves Bella in order to protect her, she falls into a depressive state. While she does eventually feel better after forming a close bond with Jacob, things never are quite the same. When due to circumstances Edward is about to commit suicide by revealing himself to the world and angering the powerful Volturi family, Bella and Alice travel to Italy in order to put a stop to everything.
Part of me liked some aspects of this book. First things first, Edward, the creep that he is, is barely in it. I get that Bella is 18 by now so technically it isn't pedophilia anymore, but come on. 100+ vs 18 years old is a biiiit of a questionable age gap if you ask me. And of course he did show up again in the last part of the book, much to my disappointment. I think it'd have been much more interesting if Bella and Alice had failed, and Edward had revealed himself. That's bound to have some interesting consequences for the world and characters alike. Now we just go back to the lame and problematic relationship between Bella and Edward.
There's other things I did mildly like here. The Volturi worldbuilding was somewhat interesting, and I particularly liked Bella's two friends, Alice and Jacob. I'm not saying I ship Bella and Jacob, not in the slightest, but I think they had a pretty good friendship throughout the book, albeit with some small pitfalls. I know it gets worse in later books, but I can at least enjoy it for what it is right now.
The idea of the werewolf concept in and of itself doesn't seem that bad to me here, but then there's the fact that it throws actual Quileute mythology and beliefs under the bus. If this had just been a random fictional culture in no way tied to reality, it might've been less offensive, but Meyer really did just end up bullshitting up some new lore surrounding the people. Just, yikes.
The story is once more mostly devoid of plot and is just characters dicking around. This might be interesting to you if you care about these characters and their relationships, but alas, I do not (sans Alice and Jacob, I guess, but even they aren't that great. Just standard non-boring characters). So to me this is a huge slog to get through. I actively want to keep reading, but these Twilight books take me easily more than a week to get through when I can easily get through a book with this amount of pages in 2-3 days if I want to. I just can't read this shit more than 30 minutes a time or so before I grow bored or distracted and want to do something else. I haven't had any book series quite dampen my love for reading this much in recent years, and I'm only halfway into book three.
So a book that has some okay elements but that in no way makes up for the pedophilia, respectless cultural appropriation and just utter boredom of the book.
Rating: 1.5/5
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