The unexpected review

I have a confession to make. I did something last night I never thought I would.

I read a Stephenie Meyer book. 

Only the novella, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, because I could never make it through a whole novel. Especially since I would have to start with Twilight, her first book, which I hear has terrible writing, and the plot....I can't read that. No way. It would be torture. And then I'd probably feel obligated to read the rest of the series. More torture. I have better uses for my time.


I. So why did I read the Bree Tanner book?
1. It was offered for a limited time as free to read online.
Since it's on my list of books I will not buy or be seen carrying out of a library it was now or never if I was going to read it.

2. Curiosity killed the cat, but I must not be on my last life yet.
I suppose I wanted to know what people saw in her writing to make her a bestseller. Going into this I had heard from different people: that her writing craft in Twilight was terrible, that her writing sucks you in.

3. It's a lot shorter than her novels.
I went into this fully expecting to not like much of the experience. Here was a way to get a feel for her writing without wanting to kill myself before the end. 178 pages sounded much more palatable than 544+.

4. I can finally claim to have my own opinion of Stephenie Meyer.

II. Disclaimer
I think it's important to emphasize that this book is a side story to the events in Eclipse. I have not read Eclipse. I therefore do not understand the context of Bree Tanner's life. That also means that I fall outside of this book's target audience, because it assumes that the reader is familiar with Meyer's vampire novels. Furthermore, this is the first book I've ever read about vampires. I have also not read very widely in the genre of romance books.

In other words, I don't know what I'm talking about. This book is so far outside of everything I like to read I don't have much to compare it to. I guess you should know that everything I'm going to say is largely uninformed and extremely biased. Uniformed because of my decision to read a book meant for an audience familiar with its context in relation to the other Twilight books, biased because I have absolutely no intention of reading those other books for a lot of biased reasons.

All that to say: don't take me too seriously.

III. A brief synopsis with spoilers:
Bree Tanner is a "newborn" vampire (she's only been a vampire for 3 months). She's struggling to survive in a pack of vampires who like to rip each other apart and set each other on fire. While on a hunt she meets Diego, who is not like the other vampires. He's nice to her and actually has a brain. Romantic blah blah blah. Together they discover that their leader Riley has been lying to them about a lot of things (like not being able to go out in the sunlight) and that there are other vampires in the world who want to kill their pack. Riley sends his army of vampires out to kill the smaller, older group of vampires and their pet human (Bella). Really he's just sending them to their deaths because they cannot possibly win against the more experienced vampires, who also apparently have brains. Meanwhile, Bree and Diego are separated and Riley tells her Diego has already gone ahead to the fight. This is another lie and when Bree cannot find Diego she jumps to the conclusion that Riley killed him. Not wanting to fight she surrenders to the older vampires while the rest of the pack is slaughtered. They try to get her to control her thirst for Bella's blood. Then some sort of vampire police come because the creation of newborn vampires is forbidden and they want Bree to be killed.

Since I can already tell this review is going to be long I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for what I thought of the book.

Random pictures to get out of a non-writing rut

This is my horse and one of the trails winding around the stable he's boarded at. Not me riding him, though. I don't own a fancy camera phone.  My phone is currently invisible and inoperable. Except when it calls aliens if I don't watch it closely. The aliens make my horse glow. Cool, huh?

This is my Thesaurus. His name is Roger. Alas, he died a long time ago. Luckily I still have this book to remember him by, even if the publisher spelled his name wrong.

This is my invisible roommate. Her name is Lluvia and she is trilingual. She speaks English, Russian and Spanish in honor of the three people who might have been my roommates next fall if the best plans never failed.

These are pictures from the animated film The Secret of Kells, which I saw last weekend. I thought it was interesting and very pretty. Definitely different from the other movies I've seen recently. It also made me really want to go back to Ireland. Climbing pretty spiraling trees is always an adventure.

And this is a sketch I drew while I was depressed and not writing blog posts for a month....

Life is getting interesting again. It just takes a little imagination.

Red and green and nothing to do with Christmas

The bridesmaid dresses for my sister’s wedding arrived today.

Long ago when my sister first asked if I would be her maid of honor I told her, “Yes, but please, please, please don’t put me in a red dress.”

I thought it was a simple request. I even repeated it several times over the years to make sure she couldn’t forget. I would wear any color except red. Considering my sister’s favorite color is blue, I can’t even remember why I was worried.

When she started planning her wedding this year she chose burgundy and gold for her colors. In my mind, the burgundy she was thinking about was close enough to red that it would still clash with my red hair. But she kept assuring me that it’s not red, wouldn’t be very close to red, would be closer to purple, etc.

The dresses that came today are red. Fairly close at least. The picture shows me holding a red ribbon and a burgundy cord to compare the dress to so it’s somewhere in between those colors. Everything else about the dress seems nice. But it’s red. Of all the colors in the world why do I have to wear the one that doesn’t look good on me?

 

Yet it’s not the color red that proves that my family members are all going insane because of this wedding. It’s the green.

Last weekend my mom called me and mentioned that my dad was outside building a greenhouse.

This was odd. We used to have a greenhouse for growing strawberries though, so I wondered if he was intending to plant those again. Never mind the fact that the strawberries had never grown very well and the rest of our vegetable garden had long since been converted into part of the archery range.

“No,” my mom said, “It’s for the palm trees. Right now they’re sitting in the living room but there are bugs crawling out of them.”

Palm trees?! I live in Washington. There shouldn’t be any palm trees in my living room. Yet my mom said this as if it was totally normal. Evidently the wedding decorator has gotten a little carried away, because sure enough, when I came home I found the palm trees still taking over the living room and some other plants turning the guest bedroom and the music room into mini forests as well.

 

Presently, a lovely wind storm has knocked out the electricity and I don’t know when I’ll be able to post this. In the meantime I have to go practice walking around in heels again…and that has plenty of potential to quite easily drive me insane. Maybe by the time the lights come back on the palm trees will seem normal to me too.