** spoiler alert ** I can't even.... wow. Is anyone else completely aghast that this dreck saw a printing press not to mention became a wildly popular series?

I thought I was being hard on Twilight when I criticized it for portraying a relationship so ill-advised and unhealthy and then romanticizing that relationship to young people as if people didn't already make enough bad decisions. I thought maybe now that Book 1 was done the series would take a nice turn.

Enter: New Moon. Exit: Shred of decency.

Were it simply a problem of the weakly-developed characters, confused and uneven plotline, hundreds of pages of cloying depression (only to be replaced by cloying sentimentality later on), and an appalling and unsubtle parallel to Romeo and Juliet, this novel would simply be mediocre teen fare.

But then we must consider the problem of Bella: whiny, needy, and sullen, blindly devoting herself to a partner that constantly patronizes, criticizes, and subjugates her only for him to leave so she can spend the next 8 months in a state of emotional vacancy so acute that she forgets everything else in her life that a girl can be happy about. Bella is only complete--and she says this herself--when her man is by her side. And apparently, according to Meyer at least, this is ok. It's ok to create a character so bereft of purpose, self-assurance, and identity that she can't live without a relationship based on nothing substantial, just beauty, lust, and exoticism.

And it's ok for her to experience no emotional maturity whatsoever because in the end, her lover comes back spewing the same gushy nonsense as before while still lording it over her and flying into rages when he doesn't get his way.

The only compelling character in this story was Jacob. That is... until he became a werewolf and became as cardboard and unappealing as the rest of the cast. The irrational hatred between vampires and werewolves gets played off as instinctual, but it has all the logic of bigotry, and that these characters do nothing to try overcoming it is yet another way in which they are immature and non-self-examining.

Due to the audience for which this intended, I have to say that New Moon and the Twilight Saga as a whole are not just poor, they're damaging.

And don't even get me started on the "epiphany" of p. 527. We were expected to believe Bella thought Edward had ceased to love her even though an autistic housefly could see it was nowhere near true?

This book failed. Intensely. I'm sorry.