Elena wakes up from where she has been pulled out of the
river – she’s not dead; or rather she is, but she’s a vampire. Which means she
has a whole new life to prepare for as a blood drinking creature of the night.
Further, she’s in Fells Church where everyone believes she is dead – an act
that is causing all kinds of drama and grief.
And then there’s Stefan and Damon – though betrothed to
Stefan she now looks at Damon and finds him unnaturally compelling because… I don’t
know, just run with it. As she gets closer to him as a vampire it becomes clear
that not all the evil acts they’ve been attributing to him may actually be his
fault.
Then the dogs lose their shit. Definitely not his fault.
There’s an Other Power in town and it’s targeting Elena. And it’s only a matter
of time before someone dies.
I think Elena has grown up a fair amount in this book to
some degree.
Her motives and goals are much less self-absorbed and self-centred and she’s
moved away from treating everyone around her as servants who exist only for her
whim (even though everyone around her are pretty much servants who exist only
for her whim). We even have some pretty good moments of self-reflection where
she realises what a selfish, manipulative person she was! An excellent start –
albeit somewhat deadened by the fact that everyone else assures her it wasn’t
so and it seems to exist largely to give Elena something to angst about.
Still, Elena is a much improved character. That’s not
entirely surprising considering how much room she had to improve, but it’s
still motion upwards.
I do not like the love triangle, not even slightly. Even
working on the fact that Damon isn’t quite as evil as everyone imagined, that
still leaves him pretty damn evil. Elena and Stefan have also had virtually no
real communication or contact with each other – especially non-antagonistic
where Elena hasn’t been furious or terrified. The insta-love she felt for
Stefan was bad enough – happening with virtually no foundation, very little
mutual communication and quickly careening down the path to becoming Stefan’s fiancée,
but this is several orders more ridiculous. Other than his physical appearance,
what about Damon has Elena fallen in love with? Give me one feature of his
personality, one element of his character, one action he has performed that
makes him a viable love interest for Elena?
There’s nothing – this romance has no foundation. But now
she finds the idea of choosing between Damon and Stefan so damn hard? Now Damon
is a competing love interest? Now we have a love triangle? It makes no sense to
me, not even slightly and makes her previous, already dodgy love interest with
Stefan seem even more dubious. And it was already pretty dubious.
But there are 2 main elements of this book that really
break it for me.
Firstly the melodrama! The awful, over the top, emotion
laden, drawn out angsty monologues and hugely flowery, purple descriptions get
on my last nerve. It’s a short book, yet so much of it consists of drawn out
rambles of what people are feeling and really really over-wrought writing. I
just can’t get into it.
Secondly the story. They have this menacing and ill
defined “Other Power” out there doing bad stuff. And bad stuff happens. They
don’t really do much about the bad stuff except guess who it could be and kinda
sorta follow them. Dogs run around being menacing, the weather’s nicely
dramatic, there’s a scary kitten – and they continue to wander around and have
the odd conversation and angst session.
And in the end the bad guy kind of waves at them because
nothing they’ve done (or the teeny tiny foreshadowing) actually leads to the
bad guy at all. It’s another one of those stories where the only reason the
mystery is solved is because the bad guy gets tired of their ineffectual
flailing and decides to attack them.
Oh, there’s another thing I hate – the big bad. I don’t
want to spoil, but they needed a moustache to twirl in devilish glee. Never has
a being who is supposed to be so ancient come off as so childish. They could
have stomped their feet for a full on temper tantrum. They actually monologue in
such a melodramatic fashion that the James Bond villains would stage an
intervention and ask them to tone it down a little. I couldn’t take them
seriously, not even remotely.
And, of course, Fells Church is still the straightest,
whitest place in the world. I’m choosing to believe that POC and GBLT folks
turned up, looked around and drove right out again.
