{"id":151,"date":"2008-07-03T21:55:56","date_gmt":"2008-07-04T01:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/03\/review-of-new-moon-by-stephenie-meyer\/"},"modified":"2008-10-11T22:21:21","modified_gmt":"2008-10-12T02:21:21","slug":"review-of-new-moon-by-stephenie-meyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Review of New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"new_moon.jpg\"<\/em><\/p>\n

New Moon<\/em><\/p>\n

by Stephenie Meyer<\/p>\n

Megan Tingley Books (Little, Brown and Company), New York, 2006.\u00a0 563 pages.<\/p>\n

Starred Review.<\/p>\n

Oh, these books are so bad to read if you’re planning to get any sleep!\u00a0 I was good the first night, and stopped after about a hundred pages.\u00a0 But the second night, I kept reading and reading, and by the time I’d finished the book, it was not so early in the morning.\u00a0 And I had to go to work, too!\u00a0 Yikes!<\/p>\n

Stephenie Meyer is good with feelings.\u00a0 Mind you, she’s got a nice complicated situation — Bella’s in love with a vampire who has an especially powerful thirst for her blood, but resists that urge because he loves her.\u00a0 In New Moon<\/em>, Edward faces the “reality” that he is not good for Bella, and Bella is not good for him.\u00a0 So he leaves her.<\/p>\n

Stephenie Meyer captures well how it feels to be left by the love of your life.\u00a0 The unbelievable shock of seeing hard coldness on his face when he says he’s leaving.\u00a0 The utter numbness that follows, wondering how to go on, how to face ordinary, day-to-day life.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t give this to a teenager going through a rough break up!\u00a0 For that matter, it’s a bit hard on a woman in her 40’s going through a divorce!\u00a0 But the author does capture the emotions involved, and you do feel with Bella and understand her.<\/p>\n

Bella does find a friend who can help her escape her numbness and face life again.\u00a0 His feelings for Bella are going beyond friendship, but he means a lot to her, so maybe that’s okay?\u00a0 Now, there’s an added complication:\u00a0\u00a0Back in the first book he’s the one who told Bella about legends of vampires, along with the legend that his tribe had a way of dealing with them, that his tribe and vampires are mortal enemies, who had worked out a temporary truce.<\/p>\n

Bella’s not good at “moving on,” but how do you “move on” from the love of your life?<\/p>\n

This passage gives you the feel of what Bella has to deal with in New Moon<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I thought about Juliet some more.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wondered what she would have done if Romeo had left her, not because he was\u00a0banished, but because he lost interest?\u00a0 What if Rosalind had given him the time of day, and he’d changed his mind?\u00a0 What if, instead of marrying Juliet, he’d just disappeared?<\/em><\/p>\n

I thought I knew how Juliet would feel.<\/em><\/p>\n

She wouldn’t go back to her old life, not really.\u00a0 She wouldn’t ever have moved on, I was sure of that.\u00a0 Even if she’d lived until she was old and gray, every time she closed her eyes, it would have been Romeo’s face she saw behind her lids.\u00a0 She would have accepted that, eventually.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wondered if she would have married Paris in the end, just to please her parents, to keep the peace.\u00a0 No, probably not, I decided.\u00a0 But then, the story didn’t say much about Paris.\u00a0 He was just a stick figure — a placeholder, a threat, a deadline to force her hand.<\/em><\/p>\n

What if there were more to Paris?<\/em><\/p>\n

What if Paris had been Juliet’s friend?\u00a0 Her very best friend?\u00a0 What if he was the only one she could confide in about the whole devastating thing with Romeo?\u00a0 The one person who really understood her and made her feel halfway human again?\u00a0 What if he was patient and kind?\u00a0 What if he took care of her?\u00a0 What if Juliet knew she couldn’t survive without him?\u00a0 What if he really loved her, and wanted her to be happy?<\/em><\/p>\n

And . . . what if she loved Paris?\u00a0 Not like Romeo.\u00a0 Nothing like that, of course.\u00a0 But enough that she wanted him to be happy, too? . . . <\/em><\/p>\n

If Romeo was really gone, never coming back, would it have mattered whether or not Juliet had taken Paris up on his offer?\u00a0 Maybe she should have tried to settle into the leftover scraps of life that were left behind.\u00a0 Maybe that would have been as close to happiness as she could get.<\/em><\/p>\n

I sighed, and then groaned when the sigh scraped my throat.\u00a0 I was reading too much into the story.\u00a0 Romeo wouldn’t change his mind.\u00a0 That’s why people still remembered his name, always twined with hers:\u00a0 Romeo and Juliet<\/span>.\u00a0 That’s why it was a good story.\u00a0 “Juliet gets dumped and ends up with Paris” would have never been a hit.<\/em><\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Find this review on the main site at:<\/p>\n

www.sonderbooks.com\/Teens\/new_moon.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer Megan Tingley Books (Little, Brown and Company), New York, 2006.\u00a0 563 pages. Starred Review. Oh, these books are so bad to read if you’re planning to get any sleep!\u00a0 I was good the first night, and stopped after about a hundred pages.\u00a0 But the second night, I kept reading and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,42,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy","category-romance","category-starred-review","category-teen-fiction-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}