For God's sake, how did she screw this up? This should have been the best book of the Twilight universe! Stephenie Meyer is now my least favorite author.

I started this book figuring that it had to be better than the actual Twilight Saga. For one thing, there's no Edward and Bella; for another, it's short. I like the novella format: short enough to avoid the useless filler that inevitably creeps into novels and long enough to go into a little more depth than a short story; it's the perfect format, I feel, and one I don't come across often enough. I thought to myself that even Meyer could put together a novella that deserved at least two stars if not more, but no....

What could have been a great, character-driven, gut-wrenching tragedy was written as an unmemorable, plot-driven, mind-numbing travesty. To quote a character from another bestselling series, this book had "the emotional range of a teaspoon." Knowing that Bree is going to die--since that's her fate in Eclipse, the third book of the series--one wants to see her fight against the inevitable, to scream at her "NO!" when she makes a mistake, to latch onto the pathos, to pity her and sympathize with her. That's what tragedy is. This was a letdown--a simplistic narrative that seems to have been written not as the story of Bree Tanner but as a means to explain a few things about vampiric unlife that Meyer either did not or could not cover in the four original books. (It's also narrated in first person past tense, something that--with very few exceptions, and this was not one--should NOT be done when that narrator dies at the end of the story.)

I will never understand why so often the least deserving books and authors make the bestseller lists while so many treasures go unrecognized. Instead of donating a dollar from each book sold to the Red Cross, the publisher should donate copies of the book to schools to show the next generation of authors how not to write.