Tags
book reviews, books, Breaking Dawn, idiocy, literary criticism, literature, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
I’m not sure exactly how to review Breaking Dawn. It is like reviewing a train wreck.
I mean, I could go through it point by point and indicate everything wrong with it, but then it would look like this:
p. 6
(NB: These are the pages according to my E-reader. They may not correspond perfectly to the print book)
Preface:
It seemed oddly inevitable, though, facing death again.
There is nothing “odd”, Bella, about death’s inevitability. Death and taxes, Bella, death and taxes.
Like I really was marked for disaster.
Bella, you are not “marked for disaster” just because you keep surviving dangerous situations. You’re goddamn lucky.
“If you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options.”
It isn’t noble to sit there and let someone you love kill you just because you love them. You can still call the cops and then love them from effing afar.
Also, chiming in with some hindsight glasses – given that this rant most likely pertains to your life-sucking pregnancy, this is risking your life for your child, not just letting someone you love kill you.
There is a difference. The fact that you can’t distinguish that difference is one of the many reasons why I think that you are a complete twerp.
Chapter 1:
Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate-glass window of his little souvenir shop.
But this is a town where the Cullens regularly drive sport cars about. Bella is supposedly driving a Mercedes Guard, but here’s the thing – the car may be a tank, but it’s not that flashy. That makes sense if you think about it – it’s meant to protect people, not look cool.
I sincerely doubt that this car is stopping pedestrians on the street and making people gawk out of shop windows. Bella is a paranoid weirdo, as usual, who thinks that everything is about her. Probably there’s a flamingo walking up the street and Bella has totally missed this bizarre occurrence because she’s such a self-obsessed whack job.
If I hadn’t been running on vapors, I wouldn’t come into town at all.
That brings up a good point. Bella, you live in small town America. If you don’t like driving your crazy new car, why don’t you walk like a normal person? You’ve obviously been driving this car, since it is “running on vapors”.
Either walk, or stop whining.
I had been going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.
Not Pop-Tarts and shoelaces! How long-suffering is our heroine? The starving children of Africa don’t know how good they have it. If only there was someone else in the household who could do shopping, oh right, her father, but he can’t shop because he’s just a man, you know.
Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.
Bella, I realize you have paranoid and narcissistic tendencies, but try to get a grip. EVERYTHING is not about you.
p. 7
It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that.
Do you? Do you REALLY?
I briefly contemplated my issues with words like fiance, wedding, husband, etc. I just couldn’t put it together in my head.
I realize that it must be exhausting to try and make both neurons fire at once.
I just couldn’t reconcile a staid, respectable, dull concept like husband with my concept of Edward.
WARNING, WARNING – if you can’t imagine your intended behaving in a reliable, respectable way as a husband, then DON’T MARRY THAT PERSON. As much as teenagers want to believe that romance remains exciting forever, the fact remains that a few years down the road, it’s going to be much more important to you that your husband is the kind of guy who comes home and helps out with the dishes than whether or not he sparkles in the sunlight.
p. 8
I swiftly put away the nozzle and crept into the front seat to hide while the enthusiast dug a huge professional-looking camera out of his backpack. He and his friend took turns posing by the hood, and then they went to take pictures at the back end.
If someone is taking photos of the hood of your car, the front seat is a really stupid place to hide. Even if your side windows are tinted, the state of Washington doesn’t permit tinting on the main body of the windshield, so YOU ARE IN THOSE PICTURES. Especially since we have already established that it is “a typical drizzly day”, so the reflection of the sun won’t save you.
And missile-proof glass? Nice. What happened to old-fashioned bullet-proof?
There is no such thing as missile-proof glass, Bella, unless you count “missile” literally, meaning anything someone has thrown, like a rock or maybe a grenade. Then again, you believed that Edward was a vampire without much persuasion.
p. 9
I hadn’t seen the ‘after’ car yet. It was hidden under a sheet in the deepest corner of the Cullens’ garage. I knew most people would have peeked by now, but I really didn’t want to know.
Let’s get this straight. Your reason for not “peeking” at your gift is not because “it’s wrong to peek”, it’s because you just don’t want to know. You also think that “most people” would have peeked, which means that you either think that “most people” are bad people, or you actually don’t understand that it is wrong to peek at a gift. That makes YOU a bad person. But I knew that already.
No matter how many times I drove down the familiar road home, I still couldn’t make the rain-faded flyers fade into the background.
Are you incapable of naming a noun without slapping on an adjective? Also, why did you just use the word “fade” twice within a single word of each other? It’s called a Thesaurus, Bella. USE IT. Or even better, let the occasional noun pass undescribed. It won’t kill you.
Finally, rain doesn’t fade things, you everlasting moron. THE SUN fades things, and you’re always moaning about how little sun there is in Forks. Rain melts things, or washes them out, it doesn’t fade them. The only thing that rain can fade is radio waves. You fail at adjectives in every way possible.
He was more disappointed with Billy, Jacob’s father – and Charlie’s closest friend. For Billy’s not being more involved with the search for his sixteen-year-old “runaway.” For Billy’s refusing to put up the flyers in La Push, the reservation on the coast that was Jacob’s home. For his seeming resigned to Jacob’s disappearance, as if there was nothing he could do. For his saying “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.
Why are those periods there, particularly that first one, between “closest friend” and “For Billy’s”? That period should not be there. I realize, Bella, that you have a real hate on for writing normal sentences, preferring either nonsensical sentence fragments or multiple sentences that have been conjoined like Siamese twins, but this is a particularly atrocious example.
Let me play the part of editor, for a moment, since yours seems to have been on a smoke break through the publication of this entire series. Here are some ways you could have worded this in a way that didn’t suck balls and make the God of Grammar want to smite you from above:
[My father] was even more disappointed with Billy – Jacob’s father and Charlie’s closest friend – because he was not more involved in the search for his sixteen-year-old runaway. Billy refused to put up the flyers in La Push – the reservation on the coast where they lived. He seemed resigned to Jacob’s disappearance and kept saying, “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.
Was that so hard? Doesn’t that read better? Christ on a waffle, Bella, full sentences are your friends.
[over four hundred pages omitted for length reasons]
UPDATE: I’ve taken some online quizzes and come up with “Ravenclaw” every time, so I feel reassured. I liked 
