Chapters 4-6: And then there was one... one hideously angsty, compulsive idiot named Bella.

Well, I turned the last page of Chapter 3, and instead of Chapter 4, I saw a page with one word:

OCTOBER.

Oh dear. I turn the next three pages. Sure enough, each one has a single word.

NOVEMBER.

DECEMBER.

JANUARY.

Yep. It's simultaneously one of the most clever devices Shmeyer will probably ever use (hardly an accomplishment), and so unblinkingly, unabashedly melodramatic that it makes my intestines seize up in a blind panic to flee my body and get far, far away from this book. That being said, most of the chapters I've read thus far in the Twilight series are superfluous at best, so if only Shmeyer had thought to replace each useless chapter in with one month-page, we might still have a thriving rainforest... but alas, she's up to her old, poorly-worded hijinks after January.

Four months of sweet, sweet nothing are broken by Charlie's threats to send Bella to live with her mother in Jacksonville, on account of she's... well, doing absolutely nothing. Apparently, all we've missed the last four months is Bella moping to the degree that she's gone above and utterly beyond our expectations for her bland character profile, even reaching the elusive point of transcendence past the term 'damp sock'-- she is now as a god in the pantheon of dull laundry descriptors. Our Lady of the Soggy Socks 'n' Undies Load rebuts Charlie's assessment by goading old pal Jessica into going to a movie, but it backfires when she chooses the zombie flick and, in a rare flash of self-awareness, realizes she's more of a drag than the zombies. Later, when she and Jessica are walking down a sketchy street toward their dinner destination, she sees some seedy-looking men standing outside a bar and starts to approach them for no well-articulated reason. Jessica has an absolute cow, but no one really seems to care (including Shmeyer). Finally, Bella stops because she hears Edward's voice in her head, telling her to knock it off. Oh, good... here we thought he'd actually be gone for more than a chapter, but I suppose we should have known better.

Jessica's evening is thoroughly ruined to the point that she may never speak to Bella again, but Bella is much too excited about her little hallucEDnation (heh, see what I did there) to really notice. Later that night she muses to herself (and to us, unfortunately) that, though she knows he's gone, the fact that he exists is what keeps her going. She then resolves to do all sorts of nutty and reckless things so she can hear his voice telling her not to get herself killed. What a healthy outlook she's developing.

At some point before Bella reaches her decision to be dangerous and whatnot, there's a whole swarm of pages devoted to her agonizing over Edward. She's also been having a nightmare about searching the woods, then realizing there's nothing to search for... or something like that.

In her new spirit of danger-driven stupidity, Bella ends up with two broken-down motorcycles. She remembers that Jacob Black is a fair mechanic (and, y'know, exists), so she takes the bikes over to him. He's just glad to see her, so he agrees to fix the bikes up for free. Good student that Shmeyer keeps telling us she is, Bella insists on using her college fund to pay for any new parts needed, and the two set out on a magical motorcycle-building adventure.

Bella starts spending a lot of time with Jacob, watching him work on the bikes. Jacob is optimistic, friendly, and easy to talk to-- in other words, lots of nice, healthy things that Edward is not. Being around Jake cheers Bella up, and rather abruptly, given that we've just been treated to a nonstop three-chapter whinge about how Ed's gone and her life is over. At any rate, Chapter 6 ends with Bella in relatively high spirits.

MATTERS OF PROBABLE IMPORTANCE

1. Bella meets Jacob's two best friends. They're named Quil and Embry. They don't like their names. They'll probably come up a lot.

2. Bella stops having her little nightmare once she starts hanging out with Jacob, but a few nights later she has it again, this time with Sam Uley lurking around and seemingly changing shape in her peripheral vision.

3. Bella starts interacting with her school friends again.

4. People keep mentioning sightings of a big, bear-like creature in the woods... so many times, in fact, that I feel a bit as if Shmeyer has been beating me over the head with a big, bear-like creature while screaming, 'Notice me!'

GOOD NEWS: Um, well... we're six chapters further along than we were at the outset.

BAD NEWS: It's still New Moon--wait, why did I even bother to make Good News/Bad News a thing? We all know there's really no good news to be had in this situation. Let's try something else:

BELLA'S TEAM: Jacob.

OUR TEAM: February. March. April.

Chapters 1-3: Worse-Case Scenarios, and the Beginning of the Downhill Tumble

Here we go, toasties-- it's New Moon time. Brace yourselves, then let's jump in and allow the instant sarcasm wash over us like a tidal wave of crushed literary hopes and dreams.

The whole shebang starts with Bella having a dream (odds bodkins, this feels familiar), in which she is a crusty old bat, while Edward is still... well, Edward, the sparkling teenaged wanker who kisses her cheek and wishes her happy birthday. She awakes in a dither and remembers that it is in fact her birthday, and the dream quite expressed how she feels about turning old as dirt... or rather, 18. She spends the day in a special-occasion snit, being rude to everyone who mentions the 'black event' (her birthday, not the Million Man March) and only agreeing to go to the Cullen's for a party after much smoldering and vampy coercion courtesy of Edward and Alice. Bella manages to stave off the festivities til evening by insisting that she and Edward have to watch Romeo and Juliet for class first, which smacks loudly of foreshadowing.

Evening rolls around and everyone heads over to the Cullen house, which is very pinkly-decorated for the occasion. Bella, however, can't seem to go anywhere without manufacturing a crisis, ad she gets a bloody little boo-boo while opening a present. Jasper goes blood-crazy and slams into Edward, who has jumped protectively in front of Bella, who goes flying into the spread; the whole bit plays out rather like a perverse (and probably, quite entertaining) game of dirty croquet. Bella ends up a bleeding, glass-covered mess, so Jasper is quickly bundled out of the house, accompanied by the rest of the family, and Bella gets to cap off her fun-filled birthday evening with Mr. Dr. Cullen plucking glass out of her wounds and stitching her up sans anesthetic.

As we discovered in the first book, Edward and Bella each have their own strikingly poor ways of handling crises, and this chapter doesn't disappoint (or rather, it does... but that's hardly a surprise). The next day at school--and the days following-- Edward is aloof to the point that Bella agonizes over his behavior and even hyperventilates on her way to work one afternoon. She compulsively (conveniently, even) takes up her parents' birthday presents-- a camera and a scrapbook-- and starts obsessively documenting Forks, particularly the Edward-y parts. Soon after Bella starts her somewhat stalker-ish new hobby, though, Edward breaks the rather abrupt news that he and his family are leaving Forks to start over elsewhere, and Bella will never ever see him again. He makes her promise not to do anything reckless, plants a smooch on her forehead, and bolts away into the woods before Bella quite knows what's hit her. Always the stoic, she reacts by stumbling pitifully through the woods for hours in a blind bid to feel she's being productive, eventually slopping down against an unfamiliar tree, with nightfall and rain thrown in for extra oomph.

She's eventually found by a search party that includes Charlie, who takes her to a hitherto-unmentioned doctor (because for Bella, a doctor a day keeps the... hm, well, nevermind). While pretending to sleep after her checkup, she overhears the doctor and Charlie discussing the Cullen family's sudden disappearance, chalking it up to a very sudden job offer. They muse over the mystery of the whole thing without giving any more information at all, so Bella loses interest shortly after we do and stops narrating about it, thank heaven.

When Bella finally arrives back home, she finds that Edward has rooted through her room and removed all the pictures she took of him (not to mention the totally sweet mix-CD he made her) in an effort to remove all traces of himself from her life. Sigh... let the angst begin.

MATTERS OF PROBABLE IMPORTANCE

1. While watching Romeo and Juliet, Edward muses about vampire suicide, and how he was contemplating it during the Bella-damaging affairs of the first book. As I said... foreshadowing? Smackety smack.

2. Edward mentions the Volturi, whom he describes as being sort of like the vamp-version of the Royal family. They also happen to be the vampires Mr. Dr. Cullen stayed with in Italy all those years ago. I'm guessing they're important.

3. While stitching Bella up, the good Mr. Dr. tells her that Edward believes vampires have lost their souls, and therefore thinks that to turn Bella would be to snarfle her soul into oblivion.

4. As one of her birthday presents, the Cullens give Bella plane tickets to Jacksonville so she and Edward can visit Bella's mum. Now that Ed's gone and Bella's pouting, the fate of the plane tickets is unknown.

5. Of the search party that goes looking for Bella, several are men from the reservation. The one who actually finds her is named Sam Uley. He comes up later.

GOOD NEWS-- Edward's gone, and he's taken the dazzle with him.

BAD NEWS-- The book is from Bella's point of view.

New Moon'd (Oh, puns... how I cling to you in these times of torment)

Well toasties, there's no more avoiding it. After finishing the Harry Potter series (again), I experienced an enormous sense of literary well-being, but it just couldn't last. I agreed to read the entire Twilight series, and read it I must.

So, here's how it's going to go down-- while I do feel a certain obligation to give you all the blow-by-blow happenings of Twilight & co (as per my reasons for reading the cursed things), blogging the first book one chapter at a time proved to be just a bit too wearying. Therefore, I'm going to be breaking down the 24 chapters of New Moon three at a time, so we'll really only have eight festering cow-pies--er, elk duds-- erm, diseased goat turds-- EHEM, chunks of the book, to plow through. That way, there's a bit less Twilight to foist on you good readers, and posts can stay fairly short and sweet (Did I say 'sweet'? I meant 'atrociously, pancreas-bendingly saccharine').

I'll still be attempting some degree of objectivity, but now that I've read the prologue, I won't make any promises I know I can't keep.

Also, from the little I understand, New Moon doesn't have a whole lot of Edward-time. If such is the case, there won't be much need for the Edward Smolder Meter, so I'll have to find some other of New Moon's oddities to measure. Feel free to make suggestions, such as 'How much Bella isn't good at life, as represented by this chapter group', or 'How much chapters 4-6 make the Great Grand Toasty One want to beat herself over the head with a 9-Iron while singing the Canadian National Anthem, in the hopes that someone will have her committed to a sanitarium far, far away from this awful book'.

Right then, my dear toasty-adventurers-- fetch your noseplugs and Floaties of Fortitude if you need them. It's nearly time to take the plunge into New Moon. May God have mercy on our sanity.

Epilogue (or, Chapter Twenty-Five)

Apologies for the delay, toastyreaders, but seeing as I can no longer stave off the second Twilight book with wonderful excuses like, 'If I don't read the entire Harry Potter series again before the next movie, Molly Weasley might avada kedavra my sorry bum,' I can therefore no longer avoid commenting on the oozy, should-be-unnecessary blat of Shmeyerrhea that the author has gone and called an 'epilogue', presumably so it can squelch about happily in delusions of its own importance. And so, with no more ado... the final bits of Twilight.

NOT-QUITE-CHAPTER SUMMARY-- Edward shoves a thoroughly dolled-up Bella into the ol' silver Volvo, and she spends more than three pages figuring out what was painfully obvious within a few sentences (or within the first few chapters of the book, if you've been paying attention)-- Edward has duped her into going to the prom. Once she realizes what he's up to, she makes a grand fuss, but he quickly smolders her into submission. They arrive at the prom, and Edward quiets Bella's protests of supreme clumsiness by allowing her to stand on his feet while he shows off his 100-year-old dancing skills. Jacob Black shows up out of nowhere and cuts in, then explains with much embarrassment that Billy bribed him to come to the dance and ask Bella to 'please' dump Edward. He hesitantly adds, emphasizing the 'Godfather'-esque absurdity of the situation, that Billy also said to inform Bella 'we'll be watching'. They share an awkward laugh, then Smooth Eddie cuts back in and whisks Bella outside to gaze sappily into the moon. He explains that he's forced her to go to prom because he wants her to have a normal human life, even if she's with him. Normally, this would seem a touch sadistic, as he's basically telling her she deserves the same miserable high school experience everyone else gets to have, but remember that this is the Shmeyerverse-- everyone loves Bella and tries their best to make her life perfect, and anyone who doesn't has death or, at the very least, obscurity to look forward to. Bella confesses that she had initially hoped Edward had changed his mind and was going to turn her after all (because in the event of an excruciating three-day-long transformation, one should always look one's best), then in spite of Edward's protests, she insists that she really, really wants to be a vampire. Ed makes a great show of leaning in and heaving great stalker-breaths on her throat for a few seconds before he pulls back and coyly tells her 'no'. However, he recovers by saying some wildly smarmy things about 'love' and 'forever', then slobbers romantically on Bella's neck. The end.

And now, in the spirit of this monstros--ehem, book, it's time to talk about feelings.

THE IMP.TOAST OVERVIEW OF TWILIGHT--

I hate this book even more than I expected to, and with good reason-- nothing should be as poorly-worded, riddled with infuriating characters, and downright nauseating as this soggy little yarn. There are many dreadful things that can be said about Twilight, but many of them have already been said by bigger experts and better wordsmiths, so I'm simply going to express my opinion of the book, with a steaming pile of literary imagery:

Imagine being trapped at a summer camp where the climate is terrible, the weather is always the opposite of what you want it to be, and most enjoyable diversion available is getting so lost in the woods that you wander aimlessly for three or four days, fighting off the occasional rabid squirrel, before stumbling upon camp again. The camp counselors don't notice when you get back; they're all successful lobotomy patients who spend their time discussing sports that they're barely aware of. Your bunkmates are all wildly narcissistic, but simultaneously have low self-esteem to the point of being psychologically unstable. They spend every waking moment creating unnecessary drama out of thin air, and at least one of them cannot communicate without violent hyperbole. There is one toilet in camp, and it consists of a shallow hole in the ground that is invariably filled with strange and terrifying fluids that should never come out of a human body.

You and your bunkmates live in that toilet.

That toilet is Twilight.