Chapter 5 – 18

Oh goodness.  Here we are, months after Edward has left and we have ALL-CAPS-BELLA looking for a way to give this entire book a point.  Or something like that.  This brings us to Jacob Black. 

Jacob is the exact opposite of Edward in every literary way you can imagine.  He has dark skin, black hair, runs a fever, acts very young, and always smiles.  Oh, and he’s totally cool with Bella endangering her life.  I can’t think of a better way to keep Edward off your mind then finding a way to hallucinate his voice yelling at you as you ride to your death on a motorcycle.  Have I mentioned Bella seems younger in this book?

Now, as inept as Bella thinks she is at flirting, she does an awful lot of it with Jacob.  You don’t need to be sexy and alluring to flirt.  All it takes is smiling and giving the guy the knowledge that they’re really important to you.  Poor Jacob for hoping that he can actually have something more with Bella.  Poor Jacob for not seeing how heartless Bella really is.  Kind of literally at this point.  You really gotta learn Jacob, don’t date the crazies!  Why?  Because they’re crazy!

At this point everything is going well and Jake and Bella are making all sorts of promises at each other.  (I’ll love and wait for you forever, I don’t like you that way, I don’t care, good luck with that, ext.)  Then <gasp!> Jake disappears like a fart in the wind, breaking all the promises he’s ever made at Bella.  We, the reader, now get:

 FREAKED-OUT-ALL-CAPS-BELLA

Not as zombie like as the original, but much more twitchy.  Show her a bad vampire and watch her vibrate in fear off your table!

Lucky for us, it only takes 53 pages (and a little spat between our new lovebirds) until Jake turns up and tries to make Bella understand what’s going on.  “Look Bella, you have another supernatural protector who is madly in love with you!  Let’s make more promises we can break!”

Let me pause here for my tangent on promises.  Promises can be viewed in two ways.  They are either a binding contract that results in years of hardship and heartache when broken or… they’re no big deal.  The thing that bothers me most about them is any promise can be viewed in one of these two ways or both.  I promise to love and cherish you all the days of my life.  I promise I won’t laugh.  I promise never to hurt you.  Blah, blah, blah.  What bothers me about the Twilight series is the lack of consistency.  Either make all promises a big deal or don’t.  As an author I feel you have that power.  This is Sci-fi for crying out loud.  I understand that promises in the real world maintain two different significances, but for me they don’t.  Promises to me are a very big deal and my husband and I promise very little to each other because of that.  (well, except for marriage vows and such.  I’d say that’s a big one.)  The point being that you can’t guarantee what will happen in the future, so the more promises you make, the less likely you will be to fulfill all of them.  Perhaps that’s a negative way to look that it all, but I still find it annoying.  Ok, tangent done. 

So Jake is back and Bella is being looked after again, and all is well.  Bella thinks she is really ready to start moving on and make Jake happy as his love.  However, this is a book about a vampire romance, so we know that can’t really last for long.  So:

Viola!  Alice shows up to make sure Charlie is ok after Bella’s supposed death.  Or to make sure Bella is really dead?  You know, I’m not really sure I believe that Alice would come back for either of those reasons after being threatened by Edward to never again make contact.  However, I guess this is Sci-fi and we do need to find a way for our main couple to get back together. 

Hence Alice’s presence and Rosalie’s big mouth.  Edward is going to kill himself?  Who’s being melodramatic now?  I’ll dive into that next time.