Daily Archives: February 12, 2010

Breaking Dawn – A Secular Novel

I’ve finally finished Breaking Dawn, the last book in the Twilight Series. Also, I’d read a short review of this book about a year ago in the now-extinct Today’s Christian Woman magazine. I did find the same review online on Christianity Today’s Kyria blog. I do agree with some of what the reviewer said in that post. From my reading the four books, the romance does seem to be more obsessive than a regular romance novel.

SPOILER BELOW:

In Breaking Dawn, Bella is still human at the beginning of the story. She marries her boyfriend/vampire Edward Cullen. They spend a romantic honeymoon on a remote island. Out of the entire book, I enjoyed the first section the best. I especially loved reading about their honeymoon days. The book got kind of weird for me when Bella gets pregnant by her vampire husband. The child makes Bella sick, literally. While pregnant, the child sucks all of the energy from Bella, making her ill, tired, and barely able to move. She drinks blood to nourish the child and once the child is born, it’s apparant that the little girl is advanced in development – she has a full set of teeth and she bites. The child grows several inches per day and develops mentally very quickly. Giving birth to the child kills Bella, so Edward bites her, giving her his venom which ultimately turns Bella into a vampire.

Having the werewolf, Jacob, around, with his pack made things kind of weird too. When Renesmee’s (Bella’s vampire/human child) life is in danger, the vampires, along with their cronies, and Jacob’s pack of wolves prepare to go to battle.

Jacob’s point-of-view dominates the second part of the book, and then the point-of-view switches back to Bella during the last portion of the story. When Jacob phases into his werewolf form, it kind of reminded me of watching The Incredible Hulk when I was a kid! He would rip his clothes when he’d go into werewolf form.

Out of all the Twilight books, I enjoyed the first one, Twilight, the best. It just had more of a realistic feel to it. The romance was strong and riveting and I just couldn’t put the book down I was so mesmerized by it!

The second book, New Moon, was pretty good for about 2/3 of the book but about the last 33% of the book was boring, so I skimmed that last section. I skimmed Eclipse last December and I didn’t like it very much. I read the first 80 pages word for word and that’s when I started skimming the rest of the book.

However, I did manage to read Breaking Dawn word for word. It’s over 750 pages, so it’s a pretty big book. So Twilight was the strongest book, and Breaking Dawn was the second best out of the series. I did think that Breaking Dawn was very weird and science-fictionish, too. Fantasy and sci-fi are not genres that I’m very fond of. I read those kinds of books sparingly.

These stories are not my usual reading fare, but I had to read them because everybody was making such a big deal about the Twilight Series that I just had to read it myself.

You can see my earlier posts about the Twilight series here, here, here, and here.

Have you read this series? If so, which was your favorite book and why?

~Cecelia Dowdy~