Meyer, Stephenie. New Moon. New York, NY: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2006.

Shoot, I muttered when the paper sliced my finger; I pulled it out to examine the damage. A single drop of blood oozed from the tiny cut.It all happened very quickly then.Edward threw himself at me, flinging me back across the table…I tumbled down to the floor by the piano, with my arms thrown out instinctively to catch my fall, into the jagged shards of glass. I felt the searing, stinging pain that ran from my wrist to the crease inside my elbow. Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm-into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.

Legions of readers entranced by Twilight are hungry for more and they won’t be disappointed. In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. The “star-crossed” lovers theme continues as Bella and Edward find themselves facing new obstacles, including a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy’s reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality.

I have seen the movie based on the first two books in the Twilight series, so I finally decided it was time to read books. I was working in a library when Twilight was published and remember almost checking it out then, but something stopped me. I’m actually glad that I waited until they were all published, although seeing the movies first has definitely affected how I encountered the books. I have listened to the audiobooks of Twilight and New Moon after watching the movies, and for Eclipse and Breaking Dawn I will listen to the books before seeing the movies. Here’s my review of New Moon.

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I’ve only seen this movie once, whereas I had watched Twilight two or three times before I listened to the audiobook, and have not yet watched it again. I still had the actors in my mind as I listened, but I had less familiarity with the story which means I was paying more attention to the plot and not just looking for differences between the book and the movie. In fact, the only thing I definitely noticed was that Dakota Fanning’s Jane is a blonde, whereas the character in the book is clearly a brunette.

No wait, I was wrong. I also noticed that in text it is a lot easier to understand that Bella is only imagining Edward’s voice, months after he has left her. In the movie, he is on the screen and I didn’t know if he was really there or not. In the book, he is never there, it is only his voice that Bella hears in her head.

I like that we got to know Jacob a lot better in this book. As with Edward in the first book, I knew his “secret” before Bella discovers it, so the build-up to the moment it is stated was a bit anti-climactic for me. But at least I was able to see more and more why there is such a huge dichotomy between Team Edward and Team Jacob. Though, as I mentioned the other day, I do think the movies are less clear on how Bella feels about Jacob. In the first two books, she is very clear that she is using Jacob’s friendship. She goes to great lengths in Twilight to say that she is trying to play at flirting, endeavoring to be believable, just to get Jacob talking about the Cullens in the hopes that she will uncover the secret about them that Edward won’t tell her. In New Moon she is using him to fix the motorcycles because she wants to taste the danger, hoping she will again hear Edward’s voice in her head. Later when they go to the movies with Jake and Mike Newton, and he wants to hold her hand, she makes it very clear to him that she is not interested in him romantically. As I recall, this point is not made on the screen (is the three-person-date scene even in the movie?).

Like the other book, I really enjoyed this one. I can understand where the movie had to cut out parts of the novel because it’s impossible to include everything in the movie without being a few hours long. Like the Harry Potter books, these get longer as the series progresses. I hope that the third and fourth Twilight movies were able to retain enough of the storyline for me to understand what’s going on even without reading the novels. I’ve given up on the Potter movies because so much was cut that just watching the sixth I found myself completely lost. While I intend to listen to the audiobooks of Eclipse and Twilight before watching the movies, it’s still important that they make sense as standalone entities.