Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

New Moon

Stephenie Meyer

Little, Brown and Company

2006

New Moon is the sequel to Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel, Twilight. Like many in fandom, I’ve read New Moon several times now, which makes it easier in some ways and harder in others to review it.

At the end of the first book, Twilight, Edward and Bella reach an impasse. Bella wishes for Edward to change her into a vampire, and Edward refuses to do it. He doesn’t think she understands how difficult the life of a vampire is, and he doesn’t want to condemn her to that. Bella doesn’t really care about the technicalities; she just wants to be with Edward forever, and the immortality conferred by vampirism is an obvious way to do that.

New Moon starts out in September of Bella and Edward’s senior year of high school. Bella wakes upon the morning of her 18^th birthday and is depressed that she is now older than Edward ever would be, since Edward is not aging. The Cullens, spurred on by the irrepressible Alice, throw Bella a party that she doesn’t want, and at this party, the tragedy Edward has been fearing nearly occurs.

Knowing that Bella nearly came to irreversible harm because of what Edward and his family are is too much for Edward, and he resolves to leave her. This will come as no surprise to anyone who read Midnight Sun, the partial manuscript for the Twilight story as told from Edward’s point of view. Edward is convinced he’s not good for Bella, and has always intended to leave her when he was strong enough, or when he loved her enough to put her safety over his own happiness.

He finally reaches that point in New Moon. And amazingly, to the first time reader at least, he does it. He leaves. If the book is divided into quarters, the middle two are spent entirely without Edward.

So, if we have no Edward, what’s left? Bella’s left, on her own, and her mental stability seems to have left with her vampire lover. She enters a state of near total dissociation, in which she physically moves through her days, but emotionally is completely absent from her own life.

It’s not a healthy state of being, but in this story, the reader really has to make allowances for the strong supernatural element involved in the relationship. If a real teenage girl were this destroyed by a break-up, she would require hospitalization. But real teenage girls do not have the hand of destiny guiding their relationships with their vampire boyfriends.

Bella soon finds solace in her friend Jacob Black, and comes to depend heavily on his friendship. Jacob helps her begin to heal and encourages her in some of her more irresponsible activities. As Bella puts it,

Only a teenage boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn’t see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods.

Jacob gives her space for a while, but she senses his growing attraction to her. And she starts to wonder what it would be like, to be with someone who made her feel better, even if that someone could never be the one she lost.

And then we discover that Jacob has a secret, too. The supernatural is exploding all over the rainy green state of Washington, and old legends, once thought to just be fairy tales, come to life on the Quileute reservation. Jacob is right in the middle of it, and it alters his relationship with Bella in ways that both help and hurt them both.

It takes a while for Bella and Jacob to find their footing as friends in this new situation (I don’t like to spoil it, but is there anyone in the world who doesn’t know what’s going on with Jacob and the Quileutes?). So now Bella, still on the fine edge of mental health, still dealing with losing Edward, has to work to preserve her relationship with Jacob, too.

And just when Bella starts to think that maybe life could go on—a wounded, partial life, maybe, but still a life—a vampire shows up at her house. It’s not Edward, but Alice, and we discover that through a misunderstanding, Edward now thinks that Bella is dead, and has gone to Italy to request execution from the vampire world’s royal family. He intends to commit suicide by Volturi. Only Bella can save him, and she doesn’t hesitate to jump on a plane with Alice and go, despite Jacob’s pleas for her to stay.

For the reader, part of us wants to cheer that we get more Edward, truly one of the most compelling characters in contemporary fiction. But it hardly seems fair to Jacob, for Bella to drop him the minute Edward needs her. And it’s not fair, of course. It leaves Bella feeling guilty and Jacob feeling resentful and bitter.

Those feelings will carry into the next book. New Moon and its sequel, Eclipse, are the two most intimately connected books in the series, and in that one, everyone will have a high price to pay for the choices they all made in New Moon. So if you’re one of those readers who gets frustrated by the lack of Edward in New Moon, just remember, it’s in service of the greater good. There’s a lot more Edward coming up, and since Jacob isn’t going anywhere, there’s a lot of angry, arrogant, intense and suffering Edward coming up.

That’s how we like him best.

Twilight

By Stephenie Meyer

Little, Brown, and Company

2005

In one sense, not much happens in Twilight. Isabella Swan’s life plays out, day by day, in small high school dramas that aren’t dramas—who likes who, who’s jealous of whom, which school subjects are interesting and which aren’t. Bella is a new girl in the town of Forks, Washington, where “it rains…more than any other place in the United States of America.” She’s painfully shy, a condition that is exacerbated by her natural clumsiness, and terrified of drawing attention to herself. She’s also smart enough to understand that the new kid in a small town always draws attention, so she bears it as best she can.

On her first day, Bella’s own attention is drawn to a crowd of impossibly beautiful teens who sit together by themselves. She learns that they are the adopted children of the town’s young doctor and his wife, and that they mostly keep to themselves. Bella is awed by their sheer beauty; the three boys and two girls could be models or actors with little effort. She ends up sitting next to one of the Cullen family, Edward, in biology class, and he seems to be furious that she is there.

From there, the story unfolds with a deepening sense of fascination between Edward and Bella. This is what keeps the reader returning to the book—or never leaving it, if she’s lucky. Just as Bella can’t help being a bit obsessed with Edward, the reader can’t help being obsessed with the love that is growing between them. Edward is an extraordinary hero: strong, mature, self-sacrificing, with just enough of a temper and ego to make him interesting. And he is as tortured as any Heathcliffe or Mr. Rochester could be, knowing that his love is putting Bella in mortal danger at every minute.

Edward’s big secret comes out about halfway through the book; it’s not that shocking, since we either knew it before we ever picked up the book, or we put two and two together along with Bella. What’s so compelling is how the secret works in the relationship between Edward and Bella. She has a million questions, but it doesn’t affect her love for him. And he in his turn is equally fascinated by her. These two are drawn together like poles of a magnet, knowing that it’s not safe for them to be together, but unable to live without each other. With eyes wide open, they make the commitment.

I don’t approve of sex in novels geared toward youth, and there isn’t any in Twilight. In fact, there’s barely even kissing. That’s one of the defining characteristics of the Bella and Edward’s relationship; because of Edward’s secret, he would be putting Bella in even greater danger if they were to get physically intimate at all. But their love is so intense, so focused and passionate, that the reader, like Bella, feels that there should be something, and the unresolved sexual tension is maddening. It’s another element that keeps the reader returning, page after page.

The big events of the plot happen toward the end and gear toward the climax, where some of the danger that Edward anticipated comes about. In these scenes, Bella proves herself to be every bit the extraordinary hero that Edward is, proving that whatever comes between them, these two are made for each other.

King of Shadows

By Susan Cooper

Aladdin Press, 1999

Image courtesy of FantasticFiction.com

Nat Fields is a boy searching for his place in the world. After the painful deaths of his parents, which he deals with by denying and suppressing his grief, Nat finds that he has a talent for acting, and is accepted into an elite theater group, The American Company of Boys. He is under the direction of the enigmatic director, “Arby,” whose odd name will have significance near the end of the book. Arby has taken the boys to perform in London at the newly rebuilt Globe Theater.

Due to some unexplained time-travel, which we begin to understand is more common in the world than we might have thought, Nat Fields switches places with another Nat Fields in 1599. The Elizabethan Nat is one of the St. Paul’s Boys, players who serve the choir of St. Paul‘s Cathedral. He has been lent to Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of William Shakespeare himself, to substitute in the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His disorientation at being found in a time four hundred years before he was born is mercifully short-lived, perhaps unrealistically so…but then, Nat is a boy who is used to being alone and dealing with whatever comes his way. So much has happened to him that he has no control over; perhaps waking up in another century is just one more thing.

Nat performs beautifully as Puck opposite Shakespeare’s Oberon, and the theatrical antics of the whole company are interesting and entertaining. In the course of the play, Nat and Shakespeare form a bond; the one grieving a dead father, and the other a dead son, they become fast and affectionate friends. For the first time since his parents’ deaths, Nat feels he has found his true place in the world.

Of course, Nat must return to his own time in the end. The lessons learned are about finding one’s place, making the most of what one is given, and learning to grieve without judgment or resentment. Nat has some very realistic trouble adjusting to all of the things that happen to him, both in the course of the unfolding story and in the backstory. Cooper offers us his tender feelings with compassion and without sentimentality; children are not idealized, but are treated with respect. Nat is a troubled hero with whom the reader empathizes.

The only bits that might be confusing concern the technical jargon of theater, especially where it applies to the original Globe. Young readers who aren’t familiar with names such as Burbage, Marlowe, Essex and Cecil might find themselves as lost in history as Nat initially was. Nonetheless, the life of the theater is described in such a lively way that I wouldn’t be surprised if readers’ minds are opened to learning more. Nat’s healing and coming into his own are reasons enough to read Cooper’s delightful book. If her book encourages anyone to learn more about Shakespeare or the theater, even better.