"Girls are cruel", Mike says. What he means is "Bella is a cruel, heartless ....." but he doesn't. Bye Mike! See you in another dozen chapters!
Bella is stringing Jacob along for protection and mental stability and her protests in the text that things are "complicated" don't really hold water. She's using him, and it's bare emotional cruelty. She spends spring break in La Push hiding from Victoria, who has yet to make any kind of appearance in the text since the wahpireball game in the last book. Ugh. She is an unseen boogeyman and it's hardly inspiring a sense of fear. Bella's protective pack of werewolves disposed of Laurent with barely any effort, why is Victoria some kind of grand threat? She's another lone Vampire in the woods, that situation didn't amount to much last time.
Charlie is visiting La Push as well and they have dinner with Billy and Emily to mend friendships over that whole gang / cult misunderstanding. Bella's explanation is ... pathetic. I know she's having a time trying to keep Charlie out of the loop for his own safety, but she's got hours of free time to come up with better stories.
Jacob and Bella hide out in the garage and hold hands some more. We get a few details about werewolves that we pretty much already knew: they heal fast, they run hot (in contrast to wahmpires) and they don't like to wear shirts. Quil is also on the verge of converting, and everyone is sad / worried. Bella also fills Jake in on the plot of the last book and rats out the rest of the Cullens' superpowers. Good job, Bellz.
Bella moves her long, boring wait time (I hear you, sister) over to Emily's house where she's again overwhelmed by the aura of love that Sam and Emily radiate. I swear, Meyer wants to be Cupid instead of an author. I'd bet money she has an archery range in her back yard.
Jacob starts to feel bad that Bella is bored, so he decides to take her cliff diving. ....
Oh. Crap. Are you serious? Cliff diving? That's going to be the catalyst for Edward's danger? How did I not pick up on the Cliff Diving...
But the next day Billy tells Bella that Jake and company think they have Victoria trapped, so she heads out to the cliff to go solo. As you do, I guess, when you're a moron. There are three pages of "why" where Bella monologues about the pain of potentially losing Jacob and how jumping would serve as a way to flood out her fear with adrenaline. Plus she gets to hear fake-Edward argue with her while she climbs and before she jumps, which probably motivates her even more to leap. In the end, she tosses herself form the highest cliff (naturally) at dusk (of course) and finds out far too late that the water current isn't particularly friendly. She has a final, perfect hallucination of Edward as she drowns and we get to put the book and series away forever, content in this final, almost poetic end to Bella.
No, of course she doesn't die. I can have my mental hallucinations, too.
SumUp F
The moments of conversation between Bella & Jake in the garage are often wonderful. Emily is brought up and Jake very subtly touches on feeling Sam's pain when in wolf form. The telepathic cheating and already flawed Emily statue aside, this is a great moment and the deft hand shown here is far too rare in these books.This scene is touching and real in ways that the rest of the book needs desperately and will never have. Jacques' liver, I've no idea where Meyer keeps this Bella and Jake stuff. Maybe this comes from her real life. Maybe she really feels this way about someone or once did. I don't know. I wouldn't speculate about her personal life except I so badly want to know why she can write about affection and comfort and nuanced conversation when she has two characters who aren't the romantic focus of her novel. Imagine if every child in Maycomb was well described while Scout was a flat, boring sounding board for the rest of the cast of To Kill A Mockingbird. Yes, this isn't love, but these things should be some part of it! Instead, Bella and Edward are moonstruck morons who incessantly marvel at the qualities of the other that have nothing to do with character or personality.
I wanted to start with a nice note, because that's all the nice things I have to say about this chapter. It didn't really work. Sorry.
I'm only going to complain a tiny bit about Bella's ongoing need to see fake-Edward. I also want to add a tiny bit of grief about her putting her one-sided relationship with Jacob into the basket of crazy that she self-medicates with fear. I have a whole truckload of grief, but it's not really important at this point.
I'm also going to grumble just a little about Jacob being "in danger" as a motivator. The pack killed Laurent without so much as a scratch. Even then, the scratches the GET heal in under an hour. The werewolves even complained about it being too easy and not much fun. Vampires in this book seem to die all the time off camera with barely a mention. HOW IS JACOB IN ANY DANGER? This is the spark? Jacob now being in "danger"? Build UP the tension! Why wouldn't Meyer make more out of Laurent vs the Werewolves? That would add tension and some tiny facade of rationality to Bella's fear for Jacob's safety. Instead, we have the weakest reason ever to risk your life: because your not-boyfriend isn't really in much danger doing what he's been doing for the last week and you're tired of loitering on the beach or sitting awkwardly in people's homes. This isn't a reason to go cliff-diving. I don't buy it. Suspension of disbelief has shattered: I'm no longer participating in a story, I'm reading words in a book. And hating it.
All done. Now on to the big thing.
Ka-Thunk.
Hear that sound? That's the last piece.
The puzzle is now complete.
- Bella jumps off a cliff.
- Edward made her promise not to hurt herself.
- Alice can see the future. Sort of.
- Edward can read minds.
- If Bella dies, or if Edward thinks she's dead, Edward is going to kill himself.
- The Volturi can and will kill vampires
- Edward considered them as Suicide Plan A the last time Bella might've died.
Edward is planning to kill himself sooner or later. We know this. He's already left Bella (for her own good, I'm sure he'll explain) and whether she dies in a retirement home at 99 or is hit by a meteor on graduation day, she's going to die. Edward has already stated that he's going to punch his own ticket right behind her, so it's down to timing.
So. Bella is now jumping off a cliff. In the best possible scenario, Victoria sees this and somehow communicates this knowledge to Edward as part of her revenge plot. Which so far is a really pathetic plot. Now this requires that Edward is somewhere near Forks to hear her or that Victoria has the magic power is to project her thoughts. The other option, which I'm bracing for, is that Alice has peeked into Bella's future at some point very recently and sees her leaping off a cliff in an apparent suicide attempt and will tell Edward. Why she wouldn't have seen this way back at the motorcycle training session will be a mystery.
It doesn't matter. Edward gets this information and grabs the bucket he's planning to kick: the Volturi. He's going to go to France or Italy or Spain or wherever they hang out in their big, heavy robes and he's going to get them to kill him.
And that, dear reader, is where the prelude comes in.
So that's our third act.
I just want to say, the reason Romeo and Juliet is a classic work of tragedy is that Romeo and Juliet DIE.
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