First of all, the end of Twilight gave the impression that Edward was about to turn Bella into a vampire. Short version of last page:
BELLA: Will you stay with me forever?
EDWARD: Damn straight. Isn’t that enough for you?
BELLA: For now, but I would eventually really like to be a sexy bloodsucking monster.
Edward “moves” towards her throat.
BOOK: Ends.
Even though Edward is fairly against Vampire Bella, Bella wants to be one so badly it’s easy to believe New Moon will begin with Bella waking up from her transformation. It doesn’t.
The breakdown: When, at her 18th birthday with the Cullens, Bella gets a paper cut and is inadvertently mortally threatened, Edward decides that it’s no longer safe for them to be around her and leaves. After months of bleak misery, Bella finally begins to find a semblance of happiness with Jacob Black, who is descended from — and then turns into — a werewolf, a natural enemy of vampires. While Bella gets over Edward, she finds that extreme sports and danger let her recall his voice. She goes cliff jumping to hear him, which creates a Misunderstanding. Losing and struggling to regain love are a sometimes-frustrating focus.
New Moon, like Twilight, was hard to put down, mostly because, for the first two-thirds, it was depressing. Heartbreak over a high school romance seems over-dramatic, until you begins to realize that yes, Edward really is that stupid and no, he really isn’t coming back. It is only when Bella starts to be happy again that you notice the stark contrast of her months of depression. Thankfully, Meyer left the bulk of the depression pages blank in a stylistically satisfying way, and jumped right to the point when Bella is capable of reaching out to people again, even if it’s only to hear Edward’s voice in her head.
Bella’s friendship with Jacob Black was touching, gave the book a much-needed voice of dissent on the Cullens, and allowed Bella to experience some much-needed personal growth. As a result, when Edward returns, she is capable of looking beyond how physically perfect he seems to be, and more emphasis is places on their emotional attachment to each other. A bit.
Like her changes to vampires, Meyer altered werewolves from their traditional cultural abilities. Rather than turning werewolves into half-humans, she made them full-human/full-wolf, with tension between the change that was refreshing. Equal abilities between werewolves vs. vampires made for more dramatic tension than if one side or the other could have had a more obvious survival trait. Far less a vampire novel than Twilight, the werewolf myth still firmly leaves the series in the fantasy genre while allowing readers to experience a different variety of monster.
My main problem with New Moon was Bella. When Bella and Edward are reunited, it seems as if nothing has changed between them. Her too-easy acceptance of him back into her life, same as before, betrays the misery that she felt for most of the novel. At the very least, she should have punched him out before she tried to kiss him, but her devotion to every aspect of his character — and her relaying of it within the first-person scope of her thoughts, seems almost as prevalent as in the first book in the series, only without the same passion of a new love to justify it. Can you spell battered wife in the making?