Breaking Dawn, Midnight Sun & Note to Stephenie Meyer

If you are planning on reading Breaking Dawn (2008), Stephenie Meyer’s 4th book in the Twilight Saga, you might not want to read any further as this is full of spoilers. Although chances are that if you are going to read it, you already have.

My cousins touted Twilight (2005) since it came out. After two more books [New Moon (2006) and Eclipse (2007)], and deciding to catch up on young adult fantasy written by authors with Utah connections I jumped in. I listened to the first three books (Ilyana Kadushin does a GREAT job with the audio versions).

I found the books full of intriguing twists on vampires and werewolves, quite intense emotional energy and engaging characters. I found Bella frustrating - I didn't agree with a lot of her decisions. I have never been a 17 year old female, but due to the response of those I talked with Bella Swan really resonated with them. So if you are looking for a window into the 17-24 year-old female psyche, this could be a pretty good one. I never really connected with Edward Cullens in the four published books, but I did feel for Jacob Black. New Moon, which focused more on Jake and Bella's relationship is still my favorite of the series.

Breaking Dawn started off quicker than I anticipated and ended up going in direction I didn’t anticipate. It was unexpected to switch to Jake’s perspective, but it made sense as Bella wasn’t doing or seeing much. I enjoyed the book, but I was disappointed.

Throughout the other books becoming a vampire is presented as a sacrifice – loosing connections with family and friends, the ability to have children, control for a year, freezing your character and development. Yet Bella manages to not only keep it all, she even manages to control her vampire urges from the beginning. In fact, with Jake imprinting nobody suffers at all in the book.
It just seemed that Meyer didn’t want to have anyone not have a happy ending. It is not that I wished ill toward anyone, but I feel that some suffering or sacrifice or pain could make the happy endings happier and more powerful. It was a lost opportunity, a chance to add some contrast to the story and make the ending more of a cathartic experience. This is something that J.K. Rowling didn't shy away from in the Harry Potter series, as a recently well known example. Well known and liked characters suffered and died. It made the eventual triumph sweeter - more meaningful, poignant and real. Decisions usually come with consequences, including potentially painful trade offs, but at this point in the Twilight world, apparently they don’t.

Besides the universal lack of afflictions, there were a few other small issues that prevented Breaking Dawn from being more than just an enjoyable story for me. Alice’s disappearance didn’t throw me (perhaps I have just read too many books with psychics), but the deus ex machina revealing of Nehuel was jarring. It also would have been nice to spend more time with some of the other characters, but I realize that would have made the book waaay too long.

The stand off of the Volturi and the Cullens (and friends) was disappointing, but Stephenie did address that in the Breaking Dawn FAQ on her site (http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/bd_faq.html). The whole Volturi/Cullens collecting of gifted vampires (whether planned or not) started to remind me of the Magento/Professor X mutant gathering in X-Men.

I kept waiting for either the vampires or the werewolves to realized that none of them asked to become what they had become. In fact, Bella is the only one out of the multitudes of supernatural creatures that consciously decided her transformation. No one ever verbalized this though.

Do I still recommend Breaking Dawn? Yes, but not as not as strongly as I felt I could have. It does appear to be the end of Bella’s story as the uber-Bella is now immortal and unchangeable.

Luckily, Meyer opened up so many plot threads that I am sure she is planning to return to this world of sparkly vampires and werewolves/shape-shifters the size of buffaloes. First we have the introduction of several new and intriguing vampires. The Volturi are still in power. Then there is news of Johann somewhere in South America trying to create a super-race of half-breed vampires. (Do you think there is any chance he was involved with the Nazi’s?) Something is going on with Billy Black that was never explained. And while this is not the last loose thread, Edward commented that Jake could have competition for Renesmee with Nehuel. With all of these elements that Meyer can pick up and use in new stories, I would probably hold off on buying the forthcoming The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide (due out Dec 30, 2008) because at some point they will need to update it.

Meyer could use Midnight Sun (unpublished but available on http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html) to begin to address some of the shortcomings in the series by filling in holes and providing explanations missing in the other books. So far she hasn't, but in the dozen chapters available in the partial draft I finally began to identify with Edward. (Although I don’t buy it that after 80 years a mind reader doesn’t realize that he dazzles and overwhelms human females. Also, I must have skipped over it but when did Edward tell his family that he couldn’t read Bella’s thoughts? Let me know where it happened if you know. Thanks. It just seemed that this would have, or should have been quite a discussion among the Cullens. It intrigued the Volturi after all.)

I imagine that after things blow over with the Midnight Sun leak, and perhaps Meyer has written another book or two, she will come back to finish this. I would also be interested to get Edwards perspective on the New Moon events, especially the time he spent in South America after Victoria.

As if Stephenie Meyer would ever read this, my recommendation to her would be to take the opportunity in writing companion books to the original three Twilight Saga books to fill out the vampire characters some more, and to lay some background so some of the events and “revelations” in Breaking Dawn don’t feel like they are coming out of the blue just to help tie up the story line. If you are interested, Stephenie, just let me know and I can go over my concerns in more detail and even some possible ways you could address them. I will just wait for your email.

For those of you who can't wait for any more Twilight books, at least you will have the movie in November, and if that does well I am sure more movies will follow.

Take that Harry Potter!

Before I jump in to what I want to talk about, let me be upfront and let you know I recommend the Harry Potter series and I believe it will become a classic. This being said, I also realize that J.K. Rowling didn't invent fantasy and that many elements in her books have been around for years if not centuries.

You can't open a collection of fairy tales or myths without encountering stories of young men and women discovering they have special abilities, or parentage, or they are the subjects of prophecies.

In the five Earthsea novels, starting with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) Ursula Le Guin created the School of Magic, where wizards could learn their crafts and their specialties. This was published when Rowling was around 3 years old.

Jane Yolen's Wizard's Hall (1991), came out years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) and it shares many similar story elements including a boy who doesn't know his own power, a wizard school full of whimsical magic (including paintings that move and talk), and the threat of an evil wizard.

What Rowling did was combine the classic and contemporary fantasy components in a unique way creating an original work that resonated at a previously unheard of level in the history of publishing. I doubt we will see another phenomenon like this for years.

With that being said, publishers and writers are still eager to tout they have the next Harry Potter, and/or make digs and Harry Potter and Rowling's wizarding world. Unless the author specifically says so, you can't know if some of these are done on purpose or not.

Here are some that I have read in the past few years. Again, I am not pointing these out to disparage the world Rowling created, or these author's or their stories. I enjoyed all these books in different ways and if you like the Harry Potter books, you could enjoy these as well. Please note that some of these comments are spoilers of sorts, so read the full comparisons at your own risk:

In The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud [The Amulet of Samarkand (2003), The Golem's Eye (2004), and Ptolemy's Gate (2005)] wizards are paranoid, self-serving and ego driven. They are taught one-on-one through an apprentice system. It is pointed out that in this world a school for wizards could not exist as wizards hoard their knowledge and don't even share all that they know with their apprentice, if they take one. Also, the magic in this world is actually performed by demons - wizards just learn how to bind and command demons to perform their will. The stronger the demon, the more powerful acts the wizard can accomplish.

In the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, Perseus "Percy" Jackson discovers that the Greek myths are not only real stories, but that the creatures, gods, etc. still exist and that he is the son of Poseidon. He learns this gives him special abilities and enemies. He also hears other characters refer to a prophecy that might involve him. I have read the first book, The Lightning Thief (2005), and am currently in the middle of The Sea of Monsters (2006), the second one, so I don't yet know things play out in any of the subsequent books (there are two more so far).

At the point I am at in the series I have noticed the following similarities with Rowling's books. Whereas Harry Potter went to Hogwarts during the school year and he feels his true home is there, and he stayed in the "real" world during the summers; Percy stays in the "real" world during the school year and goes to Camp Half-Blood with other demigods during the summer and he feels more at home at the Camp. Those who are invited to the camp are broken out into one of 12 cabins, as opposed to the four Hogwart Houses. Each of these cabins is named after a god (Ares, Hermes, Athena, etc.), and in most cases the characters belong to the cabin based on their divine parentage. These cabins compete with each other for annual prizes in various Greek events.

Brandon Sanderson published the young adult novel Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians (2007). In this, the first book of a series, the orphaned and perpetually clumsy Alcatraz Smedry discovers his parents were actually part of the Free Kingdomers group fighting against the Librarians and that his clumsiness is really a powerful ability which he must learn to control. The real dig at Rowling's world comes at the end where Alcatraz is allowed to go back to his foster parent's house and he is told the Free Kingdomers will come back to get him. Alcatraz assumes that he will have to stay with them for the summer (I guess he either read Harry Potter himself or saw the movies). They then show up within a few hours and lovingly chastise him that they just wanted to give him some time to gather his things and say goodbye, that it would be ridiculous to leave him where their enemies knew he was, especially as they had so much to do in their fight against the Librarians.

Those are just a few I have read and recognized. I would be interested to hear about any other books you know of that were written before the Potter series that have similar story elements, or of any stories published afterwards that appear to borrow but possibly twist elements from Harry Potter.