In Which Vampires Drive Volvos
After the imagined hate-fest of day 1, Bella is relieved to see that Edward has skipped school. She thinks herself a coward for hesistating to tell him what-for and marvels (as I did) at her newfound suitors in the now competing Mike and Eric. Poor Bella! She dubs Mike her "golden retriever", as if we needed a Romance Novel kiss of death on that particular relationship. I will note that most Romance Novels have the fake suitor who sticks around for the first bit of the book to provide yet another hurdle (and late night whinging/sex, depending on the type of book). I don't think SM is going that way, and it confuses me. Are M&E just here for color? Is there going to be some drama later? Some critics have labeled Bella as SM's alter-ego, living out a HS fantasy and providing something for her target audience to coo over. In the end, it just seems out of place for Bella to have so much romantic attention on her -second day of school-.
Outside the classroom, Bella goes all domestic: shopping and cooking, then emails her mother to avoid a meltdown (add overprotective & dumb to her mother's bio). She has a nice all-American dinner with dad (still Charlie in her mind). Dad takes the exposition hat and fills us in on the Cullens: headed by the very liked Dr and Mrs McHotVampire and their brood of pseudo-incestuous foster children. I'm still having a tough time figuring out why blood-sucking parasites are wantonly flaunting their glaring, crowd-inciting differences in a community in which their camping habits (obvious plot hook) and lifestyle are so easily tracked as to be dinner conversation. Yeah, the weather is very vamp-friendly, but that only works if you keep your fang-stuffed head down among the locals. It's cloudy in other parts of the country, guys.
So we breeze through the first week of FHS and learn Bella's new clique is planning a beach trip, spearheaded by Mike. We also get a tour of the town's pissant library (+1 bookworm points for Bella) and everyone is friendly and it snows and weeeee Eddy is back!
Wow he's back and he's well fed (I assume) because he's got all that grump out of the way and when Bella and Ed sit down at Bio II he SPEAKS. And it's: musical. Gods, really? The adjectotron couldn't come up with something better than "musical"? Whatever, stay in groove, as long as his touch isn't electric.
It is. By the seven hells, his touch is electric. The cliche-o-matic coughs out a two-fer, although from the description you aaaalmost get the feeling that it's literally electric. Also Ed's eyes are now ochre (gold) instead of black and he's very nice. So nice that he takes the exposition hat from daddy and pulls a bit of info out of Bella as to her new home in Forks. I will say that this conversation works quite well. Bella is flustered and telling a bit more than she might otherwise (believable), Edward is quite conversational and friendly, tugging at the right strings at the right time. If only SM hadn't started with electric and musical.
We learn Bella bailed on mommy because mommy's new beau is a minor league ballplayer and Bella wants mommy to have a nice life, free of annoying bookworm/self-reliant children and such. Bella is selfless and self-sacrificing for her mother, and it works ok. However, I'd have loved to see a touch of selfish "I wanted to get away from that fruitcake" to give poor Bella some actual character flaws (more on this in a moment) but this section gets a good bit of backstory out in the open cleanly, realistically and with a nice moment of friendly conversation between the people on the cover of the book. So gold stars all around.
We also discover that Eddy has perfect, ultrawhite teeth. No fangs mentioned.
SumUp: A-
Nicely done. We're still deep in boggy exposition land that all books must eventually cross, and SM seems to be sailing through with few problems. Bella is over-smart and over-sensitive and while it's starting to inch dangerously close to boring perfect-protagonist land, it hasn't reached that point and we're still early in the first act. Edward, on the other hand, has gone from otherworldly to otheruniversely perfect. He's a porcelain statue who has exactly one "flaw": he's mysterious. Annoyingly so, especially from the perspective of a semi-informed reader. This better add up to something other than "conflicted love of a vampire is mysterious" or the ratings are going to sliiiiip.
Twilight Vampires get slightly more definition with their coal to ochre eyes after feeding (one assumes) but the music and electricity is laughable. I'd love to give SM some benefit of the doubt in thinking that these adjectives come from Bella's infatuated POV rather than being objective definitions of Edward's voice and skin-contact properties, but I don't have any foundation to stick that to. SM might need to buy a higher end version of the adjectotron.
Ultimately though, it's still reasonably entertaining and the story is flowing quite smoothly now that we have a locale and basic set of characters. On that, I'm holding off judgment in regard to the secondary characters. At this point they're all cardboard cutouts and modest descriptions, but we're only at the end of Chapter 2, so there's plenty of time. That nugget of enthusiasm might just have grown two sizes today.
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