The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

Last summer, I read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. For those of you who've been living in a cave for the past few years and aren't familiar with Twilight, it's a 4-book series popular with teenagers, and it's about a human girl who falls in love with a vampire. What first spurred my desire to read the series was that, when I was teaching Sophomore honors English a couple years ago, I looked out at my class one day, and there were no less than 6 copies of the final book in the series, "Breaking Dawn", staring back at me from the hands of my students. I really wanted to know what it was about this series that had so many people talking.

I'll admit, I read all four books ("Twilight", "New Moon", "Eclipse", and "Breaking Dawn", respectively) in rapid succession. And although they are by no means great literature, I enjoyed them for what they were. Stephenie Meyer may not be the next Shakespeare, but she does smartly write a Romeo & Juliet-esque tale that readers, especially teens, are bound to fall for. And there's enough fantasy creatures and blood and gore to engage an even wider audience.

When I found out that Meyer was releasing a short novella called "The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner", I was interested. The book is about one of the "newborn"vampires who battle with Edward Cullen (vampire heartthrob) and his family in the book "Eclipse" (the movie version of which comes out this week. Coincidence? I think not). I thought this might be interesting. Thus far, we've only been able to see the events of the series from Bella's perspective. It might be cool to learn more about their adversaries.

So I read the book. It was short, only 150 pages (brief in comparison to the 400-500 page novels in the series). Reading "...Bree Tanner" made me see the faults in Meyer's writing that I had somehow been able to look past while reading the other novels. It was clumsy, and didn't flow well. It wasn't divided into chapters but rather was one continuous piece from beginning to end, which didn't do it any favors. I think it also exposed the fact that Meyer is not adept at writing concisely... she needs those 400-500 pages to tell her story.

I think her goal in writing this book (besides perhaps publicity for the upcoming film) was to show that sometimes even the enemy can have a heart, and sometimes we should stop and take a second look at what makes people act the way they do. But the main character in this novella, Bree, did not seem believable... the whole book just seemed contrived and even kind of desperate.

I'm sure there are some die-hard Twilight fans out there who adored this book, but I wish Meyer had just stopped after the 4th book in the series and started a new project.