Tuesday, November 04, 2008

REVIEW: Breaking Dawn


Title: Breaking Dawn
Author: Stephenie Meyer
ISBN: 9780316067928/Little, Brown and Company
Protagonist: teenager Bella Swan
Setting: present-day Forks, Washington
Series: #4
Rating: C

First Line: I'd had more than my fair share of near-death experiences; it wasn't something you ever really got used to.

In an attempt to avoid spoilers, I'm going to try to make this short, sweet, and mainly about my opinions. If you have the need to read a breakdown of the plot, run a search. There will be thousands of URLs for you to check out!

I really think I should've let Breaking Dawn remain in that vast sea of books that I will never read. Not because it's a terrible book. My rating shows that I don't think it was. Rather, it was just...so predictable. The first half of the book dragged beyond all belief. My own title for this part is "Bella the Martyr", and shows in part that I'm sick of her character. Thankfully the second half picked up pace when there was some real action, but reading this for me was going through the motions. I think I would've liked it better if Meyer had included more comic relief to lighten the seriousness of it all. But this is a series for teenagers, and everything tends to be deadly serious for them.

The ending of the series was a bit of a letdown for me, but that isn't quite the disappointment you might think it would be. I'm thrilled that so many people have found books that they just had to read and read and read...and talk about. Oftentimes that's the bottom line for me. At heart, I will always be a librarian wanting everyone in the known world to stick their noses in books and find in them the never-ending source of pleasure that I do. I know some of you think this entire series was dreck and provided horrible role models for teenaged readers. But...in how many cases will these young fans of Stephenie Meyer start searching for something else to read, and then something else, and something else? Those next books they turn to may be the ones that really get them to thinking, to questioning, and to keep turning to books for the answers and for pleasure. For that reason alone--sparking an interest in reading--my hat's off to Stephenie Meyer.




2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the great review - I'm so curious about these top-selling books!

    Gonna palm them off my kid sister when I go home for Christmas LOL

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would have liked this book so much more if Meyer would have skipped the last section. She and I seem to have a fundamental difference about how books should end. =)

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