Summary		Main	Review
01-07	08-10	11-15	16-20	21-Epilogue

Chapter 01-02
So Bella Swan is the new girl in Forks, having moved to avoid dealing with her mother and her mother's new husband. Her father presents her with a "new" truck and otherwise "does not hover" over Bella as she adjusts to her new routine. The entire point of these two chapters is to set up how pretty the Cullen’s and Hale’s are – Edward especially, because he is tres mysterious and based on the trope the first girl (or in this case, boy) wins and this lines him up as the One True Love. There’s also a good chunk of text dedicated to how big of a twat Bella is. Her defining traits are: being hypersensitive, hypercritical, and overemotional. Which, when I think about it, sounds like a pretty stereotypical “teenage girl” description. So far, she has no other traits. She’s never happy. About anything. Ever. A wardrobe change, some black nail polish and a taste for something other than mainstream music and she may not be very different from your average cutter.

And I’m personally wondering who the hell she thinks she’s narrating to. Is she talking to herself? I doubt she’s talking to her friends considering the massive amount of disdain she shows towards people who – my stars and garters – dare to be nice to the new girl. What is wrong with these people, offering to show her around campus and wanting to be her friend because she’s new and interesting? Lord, she only tolerates the people she “likes.”

Right, I’m all for flaws in my protagonists, but can we please see some minor redeeming qualities? Just a little?

Besides the fact that people seem to adore her for no apparent reason.

I’m ridiculously fond of her father at this point. I think he’s my favorite character, and if I’m spending all this time in Bella’s head, this is not a good development.

And now, moments of literary greatness! I don’t know how these made it past an editor. This wouldn’t fly in my Fiction II class.

Where was the feel of the institution? I wondered nostalgically. Where were the chain-link fences, the metal detectors?

Yes, because no high school is really school without habitual gang violence, drugs, and the need to feel as if you’re in a dog-training facility.

They were all looking away — away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell.

… so they were looking at the ceiling? The insides of their eyelids? Out a window? At a wall? Were they simply staring straight ahead with that ‘lights on, nobody home’ expression? The world may never know!

Chapter 03
This sums up to: Edward saves Bella from being smashed by a car in a Highly Improbable Fashion were he human. He continues to be tres mysterious and answers no questions about the suspect manner in which he did it. Bella doesn’t seem to be willing to buy into the fact that she smacked her head on concrete pretty hard and possibly hallucinated, and continues to be baffled and annoyed over the fact that people seem to give a damn that she’s alright. Apparently being apathetic and ungrateful for the concern of others is charming.

I’m waiting for Bella to display a personality. At first I toyed with the notion that she’s annoyed at a perceived attempt by others to baby her, or maybe a dislike of being the center of attention, but she never says any of this. In fact, she doesn’t seem to make any real declarative statements about herself at all, beyond being “pale” and “not fitting in.” Which, given the minor characters that seem to flock to her and every guy she says so much as two words too tries to hit on her, is hardly a reliable narrative.

Chapter 04-05
Chapter four essentially boils down to Bella telling off all of her normal, mortal admirers that she’s not interested in going to homecoming (or whatever) with them and Edward offering to give her a ride to San Francisco after ignoring her for who knows how long. Seriously. That’s it.

Chapter five is… more of Edward acting very strange. He apparently does not have one default mode like Bella, and thus switches from aloof to flirty to mysteriously ‘dangerous’ on a whim. Like Bella, I’m finding him annoying.

There are 24 chapters plus epilogue. Please tell me the entire damn book isn’t like this.

Chapter 06
Beach time! More adolescent politics with the one-dimensional background cast. Bella mopes and is embarrassed by everything. But hey! There’s Jacob, and we can tell he’s important because he gets more than two sentences of description!

… wow. He’s fifteen.

Crap, I don’t remember how old Bella is. I think she’s sixteen. If she’s seventeen she is officially a cradle-robber. Two years isn’t much a difference in the long run, but at that age? There’s a pretty big gulf between fifteen and seventeen. And Bella’s manipulating a fifteen year old. That’s skeevy. Yes, even if she felt bad about it.

Hurrah! Native American Werewolf horror stories! … which weren’t that scary. Not that I didn’t know this already, but still. That was kinda a cheesy story.

Edits From The Future: 9.5.08 Knowing the contents of the Werewolf Horror Story is intrinsic to the plot, or at least the plot holes. So here it is: Canoes, noah’s ark, wolf brothers! Hurrah. Now, the vampires are called “cold ones.” Jacob’s great-grandfather made a bargain with some of them to keep them off the land cause they’re the “natural enemies” of the “wolves who turn into men.” Already we got the vampire-werewolf rivalry.

There are some things that aren’t clear though. Jacob says that Carlisle came by “before your people arrived.” And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean Bella’s family. I would protest that meaning Forks probably didn’t exist yet back then, but my knowledge of Westward Migrations in the 1850’s (?) isn’t that great.

Chapter 07
Nightmare time! Werewolf-Jacob and Vampire-Edward. Could this be any more obvious? Bella spends most of the time dragging her feet through stuff I could have done without knowing about, before having a moment of genius and researching vampires on the internet. Of course, there’s nothing useful to be found except a one liner about “good” vampires.

Lo! A trip into the woods! And Bella thinks (if what she does counts as thinking) about her ‘research’ and the possibility of Edward being a vampire. She briefly comes to an intelligent notion – to avoid Edward altogether – after concluding that he’s ‘not human.’ Her steps towards self preservation and common sense are blocked by charmers like this:

Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now.

Edward may have the vampire magnetic charm, but saying he has a personality is stretching things a bit. He’s more like the token pretty boy than anything else. Bella’s freaky wondering about where he is and what he is all the time is getting a little weird, especially since Edward doesn’t have much screen time and their sole conversation consisted of , “I’m really dangerous but I’ve given up on avoiding you so now it’s up to you to preserve yourself. Oh, and don’t fall in the ocean.”

But Bella does come to a reasonable outcome: avoid Edward.

Given her weird obsession with a guy she hardly knows who spent most of his time acting like he doesn’t like her – and given there’s still a buttload of chapters left – this is obviously not going to work. Because quite frankly Edward, infrequently appearing as he is, is probably the only plot in the book anyway and taking him out of the picture would leave us with no story at all.

This is sad.

Charlie is still my favorite character.

Blah blah blah. Mike still has crush for some reason but he’s a nerd so he’s out. Cullens mysteriously absent from school. Bella has conniptions is more worried than she reasonably should be. Agrees to help other girls buy dresses.