breaking dawn: my verdict

I'm done. I've never read a book this slow before. I wanted to savor Breaking Dawn, to feel, to enjoy, to understand the nuances and meaning of each paragraph, sentence, phrase, word. And so I did. As usual, Meyer tells a riveting a story. The pace picked up from the last book (Eclipse), the excitement gradually built, then peaked to a crescendo --making my palms and the soles of my feet all clammy and sweaty (this happens to me when I'm excited and nervous), then the denouement came, tying everything up in a neat and satisfying package.

Of course, I've known all along that this book is no Foucault's Pendulum. In other words, even an 8 year old would be able to follow the plot and not go, "duh?" In short, there's no intellectual mumbo-jumbo here, no profound Proust-like symbolism to the narrative. But, regardless of how intellectually accessible it is, I got hooked. I'm no hypocrite, so if I enjoy a book (in this case all 4 books), then to hell with my Literary Criticism teacher who mouthed post-structuralism, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, in between puffs of her Marlboro lights.

Call me shallow, but I'm a gushing "Bella and Edward 4ever" fan. But, because I'm such an opinionated bitch, I would just like to say that Meyer was a little bit predictable (or maybe I just read the previous books until they were dog-eared) in Breaking Dawn. I'm not going to ruin the surprise for some people especially those with zero imagination, so rest assured there will be no spoilers here.

Also I was extremely distracted by a lot of typographical errors (missing letters, etc.) and proofreading lapses. It was painful to have found a lot of mistakes in the previous books and I was expecting the editor/s to have done something in this last one -- but I guess they all fell in love with Edward and lost all of their faculties while editing.

Another distraction was the never-ending contractions. For example, "she'd've", etc. (I'll look for more examples when I'm not too sleepy, because I am positively catatonic right now -- it's 5 am!). It's okay to use this kind of colloquial contraction when one is talking informally to someone, but in writing? I mean, are the editors saving pages or something? Nobody knows how to write "she would've" anymore?

All in all though, I closed the book happy and contented, not wanting it to finish so soon. But all good things must come to an end -- and so should this review. (For now, at least.) Let me get some sleep and I'll babble more tomorrow. Goodnight, twilighters. It's the break of dawn and it's time for me to retire.