You know things are even worse when you feel tired for complaining about all the padding.

Jacob arrives at the Cullens’ and finds a fresh set of clothes waiting for him. As he’d torn his last set changing when he left the house last chapter, he’s grateful. He re-enters the living room and finds that it’s back to mostly normal, with no hospital bed or anything. Bella hears Jacob enter and her face lights up.

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What do I look like? A writer? You need some good prose? You need some good characters? TOO BAD. They’re mine. You’re not getting anything.

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Waiting for the damn book to end already. Notice something different about the chapter title? For the next ten or so chapters, the book’s narrated by Jacob instead of Bella. And if he’s anything like he was at the end of Eclipse, this is going to be painful. VERY. VERY. PAINFUL.

There’s a “preface” for this section, too. This is it, in its entirety:

Life sucks, and then you die.

Yeah, I should be so lucky.

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So. Last book. Here we go.

Clinginess Meter: 0

I hate hate hate hate hate these prefaces. How not to do prologues. Skipping.

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The moment Bella wakes up, she realizes she can everything much more clearly than she could as a human. Everything’s sharply-defined and she can notice things that were too small before. It’s an interesting idea, but like many interesting ideas in this series, it’s botched. Like in this description:

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As Bella and Edward drive home from Port Angeles, they begin discussing Edward’s mind-reading. Bella brings up why he can’t hear her thoughts, and Edward admits he doesn’t know.

”The only guess I have is that maybe your mind doesn’t work the same way the rest of theirs do. Like your thoughts are on the AM frequency and I’m only getting FM.”

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Bella and Edward share some weak lovey-dovey flirting in biology class. It seems like the teacher had the class watch a movie just so Bella and Edward wouldn’t be interrupted while gazing into each others’ eyes. When school’s done, they leave to see a bunch of people clustered around Rosalie’s car, proving once again that people trying to hide out shouldn’t be driving flashy cars, you idiots.

“What kind of car is that?” I asked.

“An M3.”

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Billy and Jacob are supposedly at Bella’s house to watch a game on TV with Charlie, since their own TV is broken (although Jacob’s partly there because Billy can’t drive; he’s confined to a wheelchair). During the visit, Bella’s constantly afraid that Billy will tell Charlie about Edward, but he doesn’t. Jacob flirts slightly with Bella, and they leave once the game’s over. That was a whole lot of nothing.

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Let it be known that I’m not a big fan of vampires. I don’t hate them, they’re just sort of “meh” to me. And since I don’t care about them, I don’t mind changes to the formula all that much as long as they don’t stray too far from the base. If they don’t drink blood, for example, they better depend on something else. Emotions? Yeah, emotion-eating vampires are fine.

That being said, there’s no way to make sparkling vampires not stupid.

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When Bella wakes up, she discovers that Edward stayed all night to watch her sleep, which totally isn’t creepy in the slightest. During breakfast, he proposes that she meet his family. What with the different vampire powers, they already know about the two of them already, so it’s just a matter of time. Edward also mentions that Bella should introduce him to Charlie. Because Bella is a terrible, terrible person, she doesn’t want to. Not for any real reason, just ’cause. And:

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Alice’s visitors arrive: three other vampires named Laurent, James, and Victoria. They exchange pleasantries with the Cullens, having not had any vampiric company in quite a while. Carlisle invites them to the Cullens’ home, and this happens:

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Good thing I’ve got a strong Bullshit Sensor (or so I hope…).

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The hunt begins with a halfway-decent character scene where Bella’s nervous about jumping out the second-story window even though she knows she’s indestructible now. But then it’s ruined when she tries it and does it perfectly.

“That was quite graceful — even for a vampire.”

BECAUSE WE CAN’T INCONVENIENCE OUR PROTAGONIST. NO. SIR.

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As Bella and Edward run back to the house, she asks him to tell her about (bleelalgh) Renesmee. It’s the boringness of perfection: she’s wonderful, she’s about a half-and-half split between a vampire and a human, she sleeps soundly, she prefers to drink blood although she can eat human food, and she communicates effectively even though she doesn’t speak yet. Well. Isn’t that convenient. However, Edward’s frustrated over Jacob imprinting on (ghghghgh) Renesmee, but he manages to hide that fact

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When Bella gets home, she says to Edward that she went Christmas shopping for Nessie and got her a little something: a rully purty necklace. Edward approves of it. She wants to practice fighting with Emmett some more, but Edward says that’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Why, I don’t know. He doesn’t give a single reason. Bella accepts it because I don’t know. Girl, can’t you have any initiative? Bella recognizes that, in order for Nessie to have a chance to run away at all, the Cullens

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It’s time for Bella to meet Jenks again, to pick up her papers. She drives back to Seattle, reminiscing that, since she didn’t know what she was doing, she had to go through the “obviously up to no good route” to know what to ask for. I guess Alice couldn’t have written “J. Jenks — forger” in her note because… Oh, look, a Baltimore oriole! Wow they’re orange.

She meets Jenks at a restaurant and we get more evidence of his underutilization:

“Have you known Jasper long?”

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As Bella drifts away, she hears the sounds of a fight. Then she concludes she’s dead, because she hears the voice of an angel. Guess who the “angel” is. You never thought you were dead before when you heard his voice, why start now? And, seriously, even when it’s obvious it’s Edward, she keeps referring to him as “the angel” for pages. It might’ve been to convey her state of shock, but it didn’t do a very good job. Anyway, Edward, Carlisle, and Alice work together to try to stem Bella’s

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If it means this book is finally over, yes it’s happy.

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…snrk. Yeah, right.

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Bella turns into a vampire and it hurts.

And that’s literally the whole chapter.

I am not fucking kidding.

We go back to Bella’s perspective right as she vomits blood. We get a brief recap of what she saw from the last chapter, only with a lot of descriptions of pain. Bella manages to cling to consciousness long enough to see (blalgh) Renesmee before blacking out.

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