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.