"When the paper I cut my finger, just went a little drop of blood from scratch. Then everything happened very fast "No!", Edward roared, fell upon me, training on the table and landed in a pile of shattered glass. Jasper slammed into Edward and the sound seemed a clash between two rocks... Dazed and confused, I watched the bright red blood flow from my arm and then to the fevered eyes of six suddenly hungry vampires"
Summary
New Moon is a romantic fantasy novel by author Stephenie Meyer, and is the second novel in the Twilight series. The novel continues the story of Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen's relationship. When Edward leaves Bella after his brother attacks her, she is left heartbroken and depressed for months until Jacob Black becomes her best friend and helps her fight her pain. However, her life twists once more when Jacob's nature reveals itself and Edward's sister decides to visit.
Genre
The Twilight series falls under the genre of young adult, fantasy, and romance, though Meyer states that she considers her books as "romance more than anything else".
Title
When Meyer finished writing the book, she wanted a title that referred to a time of day to match Twilight. As it reflected the mood of the sequel, she titled the novel New Moon, "the darkest kind of night, a night with no moon", to refer to the darkest period of Bella's life.
Development
After Meyer finished writing Twilight, she found herself writing multiple, hundred-paged epilogues, and has said, "I quickly realized I wasn't ready to stop writing about Bella and Edward." She began writing a sequel, which was entitled Forever Dawn and skipped over Bella's final year of high school. While Meyer was still writing Forever Dawn, she learned that Twilight was going to be published and marketed as a young-adult novel. Wanting the next book to be aimed at a similar audience, she decided to write a new sequel, New Moon, which took place during Bella's senior year of high school. Therefore, Meyer started writing the outline of the book and thinking of what her characters would do, and claims that she "swiftly regretted asking them for the story." She didn't like the idea of Edward leaving at first and tried to think of other plot options, but, in the end, she said that "she accepted the inevitability of it."
Meyer wrote New Moon in five months. She found the editing process "much longer and more difficult than the same process with Twilight." Also, unlike Twilight, which Meyer intended not to publish at first, she recognized that New Moon was going to be published and had what she described as a "horrible feeling much like stage fright" while writing. However, Meyer considers Jacob to be her favorite gift the book gave, as she liked the character a lot and wanted to expand his role and presence.
The confrontation with the Volturi in the clock tower at the end of the book was the first scene Meyer wrote. She did not want to use a real city as the location for the Volturi's residence, as she did with Forks. She decided to name her city "Volturin" and chose a location in Tuscany, Italy because it matched her vision of the city being "very old and relatively remote." However, when consulting a map, she found that there was a city called Volterra in the area where she had planned to place her imaginary city. Therefore, she chose Volterra and called it "a pretty creepy coincidence."
The first draft of New Moon differed significantly from the manuscript published. Originally, Bella never found out that Jacob was a werewolf, and as a result, the seventy pages following Bella's discovery of Jacob's nature were missing. The epilogue was also different in title and content. Meyer found it difficult to write Bella's pain over Edward's departure and often cried while writing those parts. She mentioned that she never suffered a heartbreak like Bella's, so she couldn't draw inspiration for her pain from personal experiences, but based it on how she thought she would feel if she lost a child, while insisting that it came from her character, who is "much more open—to both pain and joy." She claims that "the way she chose to cope with it" was unexpected.
According to Meyer, the story was inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The review
"New Moon is the sequel to Stephenie Meyer’s remarkably good debut novel Twilight. This novel works well enough as a stand alone but I think that you will get a better understanding of the story and maximum enjoyment from reading it if you have read Twilight first.
New Moon is always going to be compared to Twilight and people who are expecting this novel to be essentially the same as Twilight may be disappointed. Twilight had an almost dreamy, fairytale quality to the writing, which this story lacks. The Cullen family of vampires are also absent from a large proportion of New Moon, and vampire fans may keenly feel their absence. Do not let this put you off reading the book however because it is still one of the best books that I have read.
New Moon is narrated in first person by Bella and has an obvious parallel with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and I mean obvious because even Bella recognises that she is in danger of playing out history’s greatest romantic tragedy. I think keeping Romeo and Juliet in the forefront of the readers mind actually helps the author build the tension for the climax of the story because we can all see the tragedy that is waiting to happen.
The pain that Bella feels when Edward abandons her is extremely well written and is really what this story is about. Most of the things that happen to Bella in New Moon are as a result of the overwhelming loss that she is trying to bear. Her friendship with Jacob has a doomed quality to it not only because he obviously loves her while she is in love with Edward but because he is a werewolf and he naturally hates all vampires.
For fantasy fans New Moon isn’t all about Bella and her emotional pain. The rogue vampires Laurent and Victoria return to Forks. They are looking for revenge against Edward but they only find Bella. The Quileute werewolves are an exciting addition to the story and it will be interesting to see how this plot line is developed in the next novel in this series.
I stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading this book because once I was caught up in the story I couldn’t stop reading. I’m sure I’m not the first person, and won’t be the last person either, to say that about this novel. New Moon is highly recommended reading."
*Eclipse - The next of the series
*Breking Dawn - The last of the series
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