The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner review

I realize this is shorter than usual, but a short review fits this short book.  I'm sorry just the same.

After reviewing Breaking Dawn, the last of the Twilight series, I thought of I was done with Twilight.  Sure there were the movies, but I don't review movies unless I see them in theaters...which I won't.  I was free to live my life care-free without a worry about torturing myself to read the series for reviews on this blog and then torturing myself when I found myself liking Eclipse and almost liking New Moon.  But then came this spin-off detailing a minor character from Eclipse and I mentioned that there there were some spin-offs that would be awesome...this wasn't one of them.  But hey, I'm always up for giving things a chance even if it's obligation so let's get this over with as we read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner in this shorter than normal review for a shorter than normal book.

Bree Tanner was a teenage runaway.  She had a boring life...minus the physical abuse from her father hence the runaway teen part.  However, one thing lead to another and Bree was turned into a vampire by Victoria, who's mostly referred to as she or her as something akin to a legend.  Anyways, new-born vampire life is just like that awesome 80's vampire movie The Lost Boys where you can party and kill with a relatively ineffective leader in Riley.  But there's a price to pay and it involves the blood of the Cullens with dovetails into that awesome battle in Eclipse!  Oh, and Bree falls in love with some Spanish guy named Diego.

The main draw of the book is to actually showcase the evil vampires for once.  No more of this "vegetarian" or love crap, now it's blood and death time.  There's always a time where someone is thinking "What were the bad guys thinking" and while it doesn't break new ground, it's a fascinating exercise in what the other side feels and does.  The attacks on the humans are satisfying bloody but not in that really weird way that Breaking Dawn was violent. 

But for all the goodwill the premise and the characters generate, it's almost undone by the love between Bree and Diego or more accurately, shallow stuff that creates the illusion of love.  It's unfair to blast it when it only lasts 40 pages and it's abruptly ended when things don't go so well for Diego...off-screen.  But when the resulting love has no connection to the plot and is even more boring than Edward and Bella there's a problem.  You take that out and you'd have a lean, mean pseudo-apocalyptic log of the last days of Bree Tanner with some nice action.

Free of Edward and Bella, plus the fact the book is less than 200 pages, this is pretty good.  Is this as good as Eclipse?  Absolutely not. The characters are infinitely more likable than the main characters in the main series.  The action scenes are short and brutal like they should have been.  For nothing else, it's a nice side story to the saga and ups the good Twilight books to 2.

7/10

Breaking Dawn reviewed

I guess my brain will never work right but at least I'm pretty.

---Bella Swan

It's over, it's finally over.  I've read the infernal series and I have hated allowing myself to see worth in New Moon and Eclipse after suffering through the abomination that was Twilight.  At first one thing kept me going and that was reading the TV Tropes page for the Twilight series and seeing what happened in Breaking Dawn, today's subject, which showed me that awesome part I have been babbling about time and time again.  Now I have read it!  I can stop obsessing over what may have happened and see it with my own eyes!  I am free!  Well, not yet but I will be once we dig into the last Twilight book, Breaking Dawn.

After everything that Edward and Bella has been through with Edward being the EXTREME!!!111!!! vampire that he is, the Indians are all werewolves and those other vampires wanted to kill Bella that climaxes with one of them creating an army of vampires to do kill Bella, the happy, idiotic bride and Edward, the abusive, lack of personality groom are getting married.  Then they have their honeymoon which finally results them having some sex which leads Bella to be horribly bruised and pregnant which piss off the werewolves but Jacob decides to rebel and become his own leader or something.  The point is that I will now discuss this awesome part that I wanted to read so bad so steel yourselves for your head may explode or you will puke since it is graphic and I probably have issues.

So Bella's baby is literally growing way too fast for her pathetic body to hold and everyone but her and Rosalie wants the baby to be aborted!  But stupid girly and blonde heads prevail so there's going to be a new half-human/half-vampire baby on the way.  However, it's a kicker as it slowly breaks Bellas ribs one at a time for about three or four times but then it gets worse.  When girls are ready to birth their water usually breaks but not Bella...she pukes up a fountain of blood which scares the living hell out of Edward and Jacob, who's there for some reason but no matter.  So we find out that the baby is trying to kick and eat her way out of Bella which is violent enough to break Bella's spine and paralyze her from the waist down.  Now since the baby is part vampire the sac that houses the fetus has the same hard skin as the vampires so normal cutting instruments can cut it...except Edward's teeth.  You read that right, Edward uses his teeth to do a C-section operation on her.

You got all that?  Anyways, during the confusion of childbirth Edward finally makes Bella a vampire to "save" her life by putting his vampire venom in a syringe and jamming it in her heart...I know.  But Bella doesn't seem to mind as she discovers her vampire powers.  As for the baby, well it's growing and learning at an extremely accelerated pace...also, Jacob imprints on her.  If you remember what I said about imprinting at the Eclipse I did say it would get creepy and I wasn't kidding.  But since the tribe is smart enough not to kill the subject of imprinting the werewolves agree to a better truce...yay.  However, one group isn't laughing and that's The Voluturi.  Word gets to them about the child and they think it's a vampire child.  You see, long ago people thought turning in kids into a vampire would be a good thing and it wasn't which makes it something worthy of everyone's at The Voluturi to get involved and we're talking Gary Oldman yelling EVERYONE type of everyone.

Alright, I promise no more plot.  I think two words does describe this book and that is train wreck.  And I'm going to be nice and not even talk about the multitude of wrongness that having Bella conceive Edward's child is.  I mean, it's probably like jamming a Popsicle down there and then there's the 100 year old sperm.  There's a much bigger problem and it concerns Jacob.  He  is pretty much ruined since at the beginning of the book he's all emo with the standard emo emotions of rejection and hate.  It's even worse since the book is split into three parts and Jacob narrates the middle part.  I would be shocked if Jacob doesn't wear eye-liner in movie adaptation.  Then there's the imprinting and he's all happy again with the demon child...that's rapidly growing and will reach maturation at age 7 which is still creepy.  At least his chapter titles are amusing.

Then there's Bella's God Mode Sue when she becomes a vampire.  The newborns should take years upon years before they're somewhat human again because they're consumed with bloodlust but not Bella.  She skips all of that and is basically Bella with the need to drink blood every so often.  Her vampire powers have the Voluturi scared and drooling at its power at the same time.  Granted, her power is a shield that nothing can get through which is cool but you have a guy who controls peoples emotions, a random vampire that can control the elements and another random vampire that is a master of illusion.  Those are powers I would get first rather than Bella's shield.  The Voluturi were even drooling to get Alice's power...which they only do since Alice is a woman, what?  Her power is seeing the future as long as nobody changes their mind!  The character's awesome and the actress playing her is really hot but that power does suck.  And now I'm on a tangent so moving back to the main thread about Bella, she has become perfect in every way and she knows it.  She's even worse here than when she was a Mary Sue in the first Twilight book because of that self-awareness, like Sky-Net gaining self-awareness and inventing Terminators type of self-awareness.

This book is Bile Fascination at its finest.  It's long-winded, Jacob suffers here and a good portion of the book is boring.  There is some good things here if you want to look for them, mostly the climax even though it's horribly anti-climatic it's still suspenseful.  As much as the Jacob part bothered me it does work in a melodramatic soap opera kind of way.  As a finale to the series, it should've been much better but I think Meyer doesn't have the talent or the brains to end it with honor.  And with that, I am now finally free of the Twilight Saga.

PS:  I can think of three spin-offs off the top of my head that Meyer could do while riding out the Midnight Sun fiasco but she's too much of a dumb broad to do it.

5/10

Eclipse Reviewed

So once again, here we are with the third installment in the obscenely popular Twilight saga, Eclipse.  Those of you who read the review of the first Twilight book knows the horrors that it could sink too and those of you read the New Moon review knows the hope that this series could actually produce a book that didn't suck. I also did mention that Eclipse was something I did want to read instead of obligation to get to that really awesome part in Breaking Dawn that I have been harping about for a while.  So did this fulfill the hope that New Moon promised or was it brought down by rampant stupidity by Bella.  Let's not wait any longer as we dive right in into Eclipse.

So our plot begins with our adorably stupid heroine Bella as she counts the weeks to graduation where she will be turned into a vampire due to the horrors of still being 18 GASP SHOCK HORROR SWOON!   Her and Edward, the shiniest vampire who's EXTREME!!!!111!!!!, are going strong  but this time Jacob, part of the Native American tribe of werewolves, EXT...wait I forgot I can't use that joke since the werewolves were awesome, realizes he loves Bella too.  Then Bella realizes she loves Jacob but there's the fanatical racism between vampires and werewolves.  Luckily, most of the story is about how Victoria actually comes back and be seen with an army of NEWBORN VAMPIRES that makes the vampires and werewolves work together!  Oh and by newborn I mean newly-turned vampires, not infant vampires but that would be awesome and EXTREME!!!111!!!  However, the newborn vampire army has to settle with just being awesome.

So let's get this out of the way....this book is good and I liked it, not almost liked it like I did with New Moon but actually liked it.  Now around the first 150 pages it doesn't look that way since it is a chore to slog through and the writing seems to be backpedaling into the horrible stilted style of the first book with a story that seems boring and a chore to read through.  However, much to my surprise this book did get much better as it went one as the main story got into gear.  However, what really sets this book apart from the other two is how fleshed out Rosalie and Jasper are, some of the non-Edward Cullen family members.  So Rosalie back story could basically be a revenge film like Kill Bill with her killing the men who beat and raped her almost to death until Carlise found her and turned her.  Jasper's back story involves the Civil War, Mexicans and more newborn vampire armies.  If I say anything more it would be a bit criminal but the really criminal thing is why can't Meyer get off her lazy ass and write more about them!  It would easily keep her mind off The Midnight Sun debacle but I guess she loves Edward too much to think this logically.....Mormon logic sucks.

Then there's this interesting subversion with Meyer's inability to write a climax.  I'm sure you all remember how violent I became when I read Twilight's anti-climax and while New Moon resembled a climax it did kinda peter off with some pages left to go.  This time it's all in the mis-direction where it seems like Bella and Edward with Seth, one of the younger werewolves, are hiding out missing the fight against everyone and the vampire newborn army while Edward and Seth mostly tries to keep Bella informed and perhaps coordinate their attacks some more.  Then Victoria shows up with her general and BAM fight.  Then at the end when the end game is about to happen, somehow you think that Bella would faint, close her eyes or do something girly but she doesn't so she sees it making Meyer have to describe it and making it awesome.

I think the main surprise is that the three lead characters --- Bella, Edward and Jacob --- feel realER than usual.  Bella and Edward's relationship actually feels like a real relationship at this stage of the saga, granted it's still based on vanity, shallowness, lust and abuse but it still counts I guess.  Even Edward isn't AS abusive here as he was with most of his "abusive" actions are due to his fanatical racism towards the werewolves or the fact that a vampire newborn army was basically created to kill Bella so there's the protective thing.  It doesn't really excuse the fact that he bribed Alice with a car so she could basically kidnap Bella while he was away for a couple days or the fact that he's pretty much forces Bella to marry him for Bella is demanding some possibly deadly sex.  Of course if he did it now instead of what allegedly happens in Breaking Dawn....

*incoming tangent coming*

"Oh Bella, what have I, Edward the love your life, done to you!  It seems that my perfect control and rhythm during our perfect love-making I have split your gorgeous figure in half much to my chagrin.  Now I seem to have your dazzling uterus on my perfect torso.  What have I done!"

*tangent over*

Wow....so much dazzling chagrins.

There is something else I like to talk about the werewolves which is imprinting.  Now imprinting is what happens when a male werewolf sees some chick and BAM falls in love with her completely and totally.  This is fine when it's somebody of their own age.  Then there's time one of the guys imprints on a two-year old.  Now there's not going to be any sex for at this stage of the game, that guy is going to be a great father figure but when that girl is going to be of age BAM sex.  It's all very creepy and if the spoilers on TV Tropes are to believed and they are....it'll all get very creepy and weird in the next book.

Despite what I keep saying and all the jokes I made, I do like it.  It is very entertaining once you power through the first 150 pages.  There are some moments of near-brilliance in a couple chapters and it's nice to finally resolve the Victoria storyline.  If this book was a person, I'd treat it to a beer and I wouldn't even think of killing it like the first book or just ignoring it like the second.  Now, there's nothing in my way in my quest to determine if Breaking Dawn is The Marine of literature.

7/10

New Moon reviewed

So we're in the second book of the Twilight Saga.  If you read the review of the first book....let's just say there was much pain and suffering as I struggled to read through the horrible writing, the abusive Edward who was the most interesting character and the horrible lack of build-up for the villains.  So why did I read this book and have plans to read the others?  It's not because of the movies even though I'll watch them eventually but it was because I saw the most awesome thing that happened in Breaking Dawn.  I'm not going to say what it is cause it's spoiler-riffic and it's so awesome that you're head might explode if not properly prepared.  Of course, for Breaking Dawn to make sense you would have to read New Moon and Eclipse so here we are.  So how much pain did I inflict upon myself while reading it?  Without further delay, let's dig into New Moon.

So it's a few months after the aftermath of the first book, Bella's 18th birthday is approaching which scares here cause she's stupid(more on that later).  So the Cullens, you remember the vampires who glowed like diamonds in the sun and were EXTREME!!!!111!!!, throw her a party and one thing leads to another and Jasper wants to feed off her.  This debacle leads to the Cullens and Edward leaving FOREVER which leads Bella in a horrible, but well-deserved, depression and eventually the realization that doing stupid things leads to Bella hearing Edward's voice which keeps here alive.  That and her growing relationship with Jacob Black, that Native American guy from the first one.  However, since Bella is, well Bella, it turns out that Jacob and most of his Indian tribe are WEREWOLVES....EXTREME!!!11....wait, these werewolves are normal werewolves except for the full-moon thing so they're more like the Teen Wolf werewolves except they don't play sports and they don't suck.

So this may come as a shock but I did almost like this.  I think the biggest strength was the relationship between Bella and Jacob.  Anybody that's literate knows that relationship between Bella and Edward isn't that healthy with the stalking, controlling and the pseudo-abuse.  I was also a bit bummed that Edward was the only interesting character from the first book and I prepared for the worst when he was only around for 1/3 of the book.  Luckily, Jacob is a much more interesting character this time around and Edward's a bit boring this time around, I don't know why.  But Jacob is nice, he's caring and he's not abusive or anything like that!  Even Bella seems to realize this and wants to spend more time with him and almost forgets Edward.  Then the whole werewolf thing comes along and there goes that but they still remain friends...until the Cullens return.

Another massive improvement in this is that the there's actually build-up for these new developments.  There's this new family of Vampires called The Voluturi that live in Italy and they are talked about in the beginning of the book!  Now compare that to the build up James, Victoria and Laurent at the first book....there was none!  They just suddenly appeared and messed some crap up but not in an awesome way.  Oh, Victoria and Laurent are back but Laurent just has a cameo cause things don't work out to well for him and Victoria...same thing as before, we're told she's doing stuff and she has a body count but we don't actually see her.  Alright, back to The Voluturi, the most dangerous vampire family with their evil powers and them being the enforcers of The Vampiric Rule with an iron fist.  They're not in there for that long but they do make an impression and they are pretty intimidating, I guess.  I want to see more of them.

So there is one very massive flaw...can you guess what it is?  If you can't, you haven't been reading this review cause I did mention I would mention Bella's stupidity later and here it is.  If you think that going out with a vampire that's abusive was the dumbest thing she could ever do, you are so very wrong.  There's the fact that she wants to be vampire so bad that her inferior brain can't comprehend why Edward doesn't do it immediately and  she can't picture life not as vampire due to her being the ungodly old age of 18 GASP HORROR SWOON CRY!  There's the fact that that she does dangerous things to hear Edward that culminates in her jumping off a cliff falling hundreds of feet to the jagged rocks below but this was the 1920's so human bodies were tougher then...wait, that was Grandpa Simpson.  Bella just jumps a 100 feet in the cold water where she almost drowns cause Edward is telling her to swim because she will never happy again.  That train of logic is why I have no intentions of ever getting married or anything like that.  What if I snagged a Bella?  The horror...the horror.

So I am in full self-loathing mode because everything about New Moon is much better than Twilight in almost every way and I almost liked it.  The writing is more natural and actually has evidence that somebody proofread it and deleted some of the unnecessary words from it.  There's actually a healthy relationship between Bella and Jacob but the Twihards are too stupid to get it and pretty much hate Jacob for not being Edward and snagging Bella.  The Voluturi are almost interesting and I want to read Eclipse, not because of obligation to validate my suspicion that Breaking Dawn might be The Marine of literature, but that I want to see what these guys are going to do next.  Hell, this book isn't even a chore to get through.  However, this book is held back by the horribly stupid Bella just like Limp Bizkit was held back by the horribly stupid Fred Durst.  Whether this volume is going rise above the saga like Significant Other rose above Limp Bizkit's discography remains to be seen but I wouldn't mind finding out.

6/10

Twilight reviewed...the novel, not the movie

So a week or so ago, I saw the Twilight movie and noticed it was like a crappy self-insert fan-fic. So like a rube, I wanted to see how bad the book without the movie blocking the worst tendencies of novels. So what did I learn from this? What do I see when I look into the fans eyes? Why did I bang my head on the book a few times out of frustration? Let's find out as we go into Twilight.

So our story begins with our Mary Sue...I mean Bella Swan moves to Forks, Washington from Phoenix(I'll get to Bella's Mary Sue-ness a bit later). She's all awkward and clumsy and stuff like that but by some miracle she has her own guy following cause she's all hot and stuff but she doesn't get it....apparently she doesn't look at mirrors or any other reflective surfaces. But one day, she notices EDWARD CULLEN, the hottest guy on Earth, ours and all parallel Earths. But little does she know that he's a VAMPIRE!!!!!1111EXTREME!1!!1 Then she knows...then they date. Finally some other vampires try to kill Bella cause they're evil and they hunt the blood of humans, while the Cullen family hunt the blood of animals.....EXTREME!!!111!!!!

The first thing that you notice about this book is the quality of the writing.....IT'S HORRIBLE! And I'm not talking about the fancy things like plot, characterization or dialogue. I am talking about sentence construction, pacing and grammar. If you read any random sentence aloud, it just reads fake and stilted. And then there's the various subplots that don't have any payoffs, lead nowhere and in the end are pointless. Then there's the Tyler Crowley subplot, he was that black guy who almost crashed his van into Bella before Edward used his super speed to save her life, which is insulting. And no, I'm not going to play the race card in this cause Tyler's race wasn't specified in the book(just the movie) so I got to go with the interest in fairness. Anyways, to atone for his sin of nearly killing our plucky heroine, he wants to FORCIBLY take Bella to prom despite him telling him no to that other school dance and making her disinterest known to him in a fairly obvious way. Then he's conveniently ignores the obvious fact that Edward and Bella are DATING EXCLUSIVELY but it's fairly well known....that's not only delusional, that's insulting.

Now there's our hot, sexy vampire Edward who is an expert in manipulation and emotional abuse. What, he is? The first half of the book he's basically like "Hi we can be friends, just kidding. I'm sorry, want to be friends can we? Nah, just kidding. Alright, wanna date?" and then he insults her and tries to shoot her ideas at the climax. Sure there's good moments but he's just manipulating Bella's weak, girly emotions so she could justify his actions with "But he truly loves me!", like standing out of the window which isn't creepy at all. Then there's all the descriptions towards Edward and it's all very creepy, detailed and somewhat soft-porn at times. I don't wanna sit in the chair that Stephenie Meyer sat in while writing the Edward descriptions. The sad thing is that Edward's the most interesting character, not because he's the most developed character but everyone else is so boring. That book Meyer was working on with Twilight from Edward's perspective would've been awesome. Then it had to be leaked and Meyer had to be a brat and say "No, I can't work on it now so I'm going to kill the project. I'll kill it to death! I'll kill it so it won't be alive anymore, even!" I mentioned I'd get to Bella's Mary Sue-Ness and here it is: she can cook, is instantly popular, is instantly getting guys, has everything about her and she's clumsy...which is a classic Mary Sue trait to make Mary Sue's not Mary Sue's. And we she nearly gets killed by Tyler's death van, pretty much the whole school stops and they visit her! Why? She's only been in town a few days and now she's like ultra-popular....sigh. Everyone else, is not worth mentioning.

Well maybe the villains, if only how they just show up in a failed attempt to generate suspense. There's no build-up, no menance and the end-game just comes out of nowhere...for the most part and in the end, they're mostly pointless. I mean, Laurent just sits the big fight out(maybe he's the smart one), we're only told that Victoria is out doing stuff we never see her do stuff and James is the one we get to see do stuff and he traps Bella in a decent trap. Then he has gloat like a James Bond villain before Edward comes and they have an awesome fight. Oh wait, we don't get to see that cause Bella has to be unconscious and we only have to get little clues about it. Don't get me wrong that is fine, in theory, to imagine the fight based on the clues we're given. Let's see there's some a few sounds, later Edward tells Bella he's dead and then later there's a mention that the fighting place was burned down. THAT'S PATHETIC! What can we imagine from that? Then there was that build-up that James was the most lethal, dangerous and evil vampire from the three evil ones that we should've gotten a real knock-down, drag-out fight like the movie did...and then the movie fight ended with Alice tearing off James head, which was kinda cool, too cool for the book.

So in short, WATCH THE MOVIE! As mediocre as it is, it's better in every conceivable way. The cinematography is good, the chicks are hot and Robert Pattison is pretty good in it. Or you could listen to "Decode" by Paramore. That's a great song, the singer chick is hot and it's like cliffnotes version of Twilight, if it was awesome. If I had a stake, I would stake the book! If it was morning, I would throw it into the sun! If I had holy water, I would drown it! I mean anyone who likes this book doesn't know what love is, doesn't know what emotional abuse is and should just off themselves cause they won't find anyone like Edward to abuse them.

2/10