T.03.07 Unhappy Ending

In Which We Finally Meet Rosalie

Rosalie has been background noise for two and a half books, stepping into the spotlight only briefly at the end of each book to do something anti-Bella and then fading out again. Here, we have a whole chapter on Ms. Rosalie Hale's life.

Rosalie tells Bella about her life in 1923. She was a fluffy, beautiful daughter of a banker who was admittedly quite shallow. She desired only one thing: a family. Her arranged fiance crosses paths with her while drinking with his buddies and they take liberties, leaving her for dead. Carlisle finds her and tries to rescue her, then converts her.

Rosalie tells Bella that she's never fed on humans. She did, however, get revenge on her rapists. So she's killed 7 people.

The point of all this backstory (aside from finally getting some backstory) is to explain Rosalie's dislike of Bella. Rosalie is used to getting what she wants, and at one point she wanted Edward. Now, Rosalie's still jealous, but only because (she admits) she's very vain and wants everyone to want her. But that isn't the big pole in the tent. Rosalie is angry that Bella has the chance for all the things that Rosalie had stolen from her, family, children, life, and is choosing to become a vampire. In short, Bella is willingly following the path Rosalie was forced to take and never wanted.

The next day, Bella is leaving school when she hears a motorcycle. Jacob has come to take her since his plans are outside Alice's radar and since Bella didn't know beforehand, That way Edward and Alice can't interfere fast enough.

SumUp B

So Rosalie is now more human than most of the other vampires. She has clear flaws, clear problems and a story that supports it. Yeah, it's thin and somewhat cliche and I knew exactly what was going to happen, BUT there are touches of real writing here. Rosalie refuses to feed from her rapists because it would be a mirror of her own rape. She didn't, as she puts it, want anything of theirs inside her. THAT is good stuff.

Sadly, we're 1/3 of the way through the third book in the series and we're finally finding out information about a character that's been wearing the evil stepsister hat since the very beginning of the first book. Meyer is slowly going through the Cullen siblings and giving us history in giant bites. You know what would have been nice? A morsel of this back when Rosalie was dazzling Bella at the lunch table. "Why doesn't she like me?" she could have asked. Edward grimaces and shakes his head. "You're giving up something she's always wanted. I can't tell you..." sort of deal. Instead we had ONE moment during the vote chapter at the end of the last book and nothing else.