So it's 60 and sunny in Forks, a week after the snow and ice storm. Not impossible weather, but strange enough you'd expect a comment or two. That said, I don't even know what month it's supposed to be as SM hasn't included any holidays or actual calendar clues other than "school is in session".
Bella = +1 bookworm (Macbeth) which will be revealed later to be part of a reading assignment. Jessica is gossipy and likes Mike and they're all going to the beach. It's too sunny for Vampires, though. Sorry, Edward!
Bella's circle of friends seems to be Jessica, Lauren (jealous of B&E), Angela, Mike, Eric, the recently minted Lee and the similarly newly introduced Samantha and Ben, who are all going to the beach with them. The numbers are a bit sketchy, but there seems to be at least a dozen kids en route.
When we reach La Push beach, SM pulls out all the descriptive stops and does a great job with the beach, surrounding tide pools and forest. It's really very well done and she's got the adjectotron up and purring when it comes to the natural world of La Push. After a walk around the tide pools (+ clumsy Bella, + clumsy Bella) they're joined by some kids from the local Quileutes Native Reservation, most notably Jacob, son of Billy who is friends with Bella's dad and source of my favorite character of the novel so far: indestructible truck.
Bella and Jacob break away from the group and have an odd chat in the woods. Bella uses her feminine wiles to pry a few scary stories out of Jacob after he reveals he knows something about Edward + the Cullens. And here... things go wonky. Really wonky. Purely from a descriptive standpoint, things are fine. The conversation flows somewhat easily (a few exposition hiccups) and Bella seems genuinely charming and at ease with the slightly younger Jacob. The problem is the content. With only the slightest bit of eye-flutter, Jacob tells Bella every single secret he knows about the Quileutes tribe and Cullen Vampire Brood and their century-long truce and reveals that the camping story = the vampires hunting animals instead of people. Given the chance, maybe he'd have told her his ATM PIN and underwear size. This essentially hands the backstory of the upcoming Werewolf VS Vampire plotline (sorry to spoil that for you) to the reader on a big silver platter with flowers and a mint. Everything you ever wanted to know in but a few sections of dialogue.
Aside from the shockingly lazy "plotline for dummies" approach, I'm absolutely stunned that
- Jacob KNOWS all this as some 15 year old kid
- Jacob would just spill the beans on what he clearly knows is some kind of tribal secret
- Jacob knows the Cullens are Vampires and hunt animals to avoid hunting humans
Then he laughs it off. By Chaucer's spleen...
The rest of the chapter is immaterial. HERE is what we have:
IF Jacob is just some dumb kid presenting tribal lore as superstition to some pretty girl, the angle that SM is playing in the text, then Jacob cannot possibly be a Werewolf or know his tribal kin are truly Werewolves at this point. I know from the movie trailers and other media that Jacob is either a Werewolf later or very closely related to several. This means Jacob will find all this out to be true AND be converted (activated?) as a Werewolf in the story. So this will look like a stupid, naive thing to have done and he should feel like a moron. Even if this excuses his blabbering to some degree, it then raises the giant, hairy question of why the Tribal Elders (or whatever) are telling teenagers what they absolutely must know is the truth about these tribal secrets. Somebody, somewhere is letting cats out of bags by the score.
The other option is that Jacob KNOWS all this tribal "superstition" is true (whether he's actually a WWolf or not). This means Jacob KNOWS that the Cullens are true Vampires and KNOWS that there is (er... was) some sort of truce between the two. This option requires us to believe that Jacob is essentially outing both his family/tribe as dangerous, supernatural killers AND outing the Cullens as dangerous, supernatural killers AND revealing (and thus breaking) a century long truce between them to a girl he barely knows because he's attracted to her. This is ludicrous in the extreme. This is a spy novel in which the Russian Spy reveals he's got the keycode to the President's secret bathroom to a lady at McDonalds while waiting for his handlers to send him on his next mission.
SumUp: DEPENDS
Option A = C-
This plot is more acceptable, but just barely. It's a silly conversation in which a boy tells spooky ghost stories in the woods to a girl to impress her. Key problem 1: every inch of every superstitions bit of nonsense he's dishing out is literally true in every detail. There's no embellishment, no imagination, nothing but unvarnished plot points and key information. Worse, it doesn't give Bella anything to work out for herself. This is a Scooby-Doo mystery in which Old Man Smithers pulls of the mask when the van pulls up after the opening theme song. Bella doesn't have to dig kernels of truth out of a superstitious pile and connect them to her experiences to conclude Edward = Vampire, Jacob has spelled it all out for her (and the audience) with barely any prompting. The flaws here aren't in the Jacob + Bella encounter, they're in the means by which the author handles her main character. Key problem 2: Loose lips sink ships, so who in the Q's knows the truth and is dishing it out?
Option B = F--**
Option B is a train wreck without some unbelievable storytelling in which Jacob is leading a Werewolf revolution against his own Tribe and the Vampires and the humans or something. There's no excuse, none, for this plothole otherwise. This means either that SM changed her mind about what Jacob and the Quileutes were after writing this OR that she couldn't imagine Bella getting this information from anywhere except straight from the Werewolf's mouth, and THEN couldn't figure out any way to present that information except as bald facts wrapped in the thinnest gauze of "superstitious scary stories" by a character who could not possibly be so motivated to reveal these facts in this way.The flaws here are universal and fatal.
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