Meyer, Stephenie. Eclipse. Little Brown, New York, 2007. ISBN: 9780316027656
Edward is now back in Bella’s life, much to her father and Jacob’s dismay. Now Bella has to deal with a strange intruder in her room and the discord between the werewolves and the vampires. Edward and Bella get engaged but she realizes that she loves Jacob as well. What’s a girl to do?
I’m starting my review of Eclipse before I finish it so I can keep tabs on the reactions I have throughout the book. First I have a hard time with Bella. She is in love with Edward but not for his money and beauty, as she claims, but because of him because of how caring he is. Okay, fine. So he never lets her out of his sight, never lets her visit Jacob, already made her father hate him for leaving her a mess, but yet she wants to become a vampire, marry him and leave everyone behind? Rosalie already explained how awful the pain was and how much not having a normal life sucks. And this girl is our heroine whom we want to see happy in the end? Is what the heroine wants better than what we as the reader want though?
Bella tells Jacob that, “I love him [Edward]. Not because he’s beautiful or because he’s rich” (110). Oh, that’s a good one, Bella. That’s the only reason you love him. A couple hundred pages later she says, “I had so many more important things to think about, but his smile still knocked the breath out of me. He was so beautiful that it made it hard sometimes to think about anything else…I was only human” (314-5). That’s right, Bella, you’re a stupid human.
She was an emotional wreck when Edward left and Jacob was there to befriend her. But now that Edward is back and gung-ho on this whole marriage thing, she’s mad at everyone who is standing in her way. Oh no, my father doesn’t deserve how nice my boyfriend is to him. Oh no, Jacob doesn’t like him and so I have to fight with him all the time. And if I want to go see him I can’t anyway because my vampire cult soon-to-be in-laws are keeping me captive. Oh well, I’m only human.
I don’t like Bella. I guess Meyer wants to write her abhorrence for marriage to be some testament to her problems of being a child of divorce. But how does that work? All she does is cook and clean for her father. He tries to stick up for her but she’s not worried about leaving him forever as a vampire, she’s just worried about Alice being disappointed that she can’t do a wedding for her. Yes, I totally believe that this girl is this beloved that everyone would take the time to go out of their way to force her to be social. She doesn’t do anything that gives her any personality except get depressed and ride motorcycles (hence why New Moon is the best book so far.)
I don’t like Edward. He’s a pretty vampire. Hooray. He loves Bella and wants to “protect” her so he suffocates her. She is never out of his sight or ever anywhere without his say-so. In the real world we call this abuse.
But this is fiction and we understand that love is blind and dumb (very dumb) and things happen because of the intensity of a love relationship. Honestly though, it didn’t need to go on this long. Someone had said you can read the first book and the last and get the whole drift of the story. I believe that. This book was merely fluff.
I really don’t want to read the last book. Eclipse was the dullest thing, albeit entertaining in a Snakes on a Plane kind of way, but still nothing happened except for some lovey drama and some dismembering towards the very end. Wow. I had to read through three back stories (snore) and then being told over and over that this book was based on Wuthering Heights because Lord knows I or any teenage reader would be too dumb to figure this out. (And besides, Heathcliff had a deep, long-rooted love for Cathy that went way beyond a year of being stalked by a vampire and…you know what, never mind.)
I’ll go as far as to say that the idea is great, it just could have been done better. And what was up with the epilogue being written in Jacob’s point of view? Where the heck did that come from? You have four books in a series and at the end of the third you decide to throw in a different narrator? Meyer must have gotten as sick of Bella as we did.
I was told that Jacob tells half of the story in the last book too. No, just no. I don’t want to read anything about how much he loves this little twit and how she is the “stubbornest” person in the world. I also don’t care if Bella and Edward get married, have a wedding night, have a kid, turn into a vampire or anything. I read other criticisms; I know how disappointing it’s going to be even if it had a chance of being interesting.
But, alas, I’ve made it this far. I’ll take a hiatus and read Breaking Dawn at some point and put that under my belt of experiences. I just don’t know when I can stomach it. I’m afraid my own writing is going to suffer from the saturation of bad writing. (Sorry, Stephenie, I know you tried.)
