Part of my New Year's resolutions is to read a lot of books, and an unofficial aspect of that goal is to read a few genres I don't normally read.
Besides Harry Potter, I haven't read any Young Adult (YA) novels since I myself was a young adult.
A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed a book called "Twilight," which was the first book in the Twilight Saga written by Stephenie Meyer.
Over the last 6 days, I read the second in that series, "New Moon," so here I am reviewing once more.
In the first book of the Twilight Saga, Bella falls in love with a vampire named Edward.
In this second book, Edward is taken out of the picture and Bella suffers greatly at the loss of her true love.
She befriends Jacob who turns out to be another type of mythical creature.
Bella uses this new friendship to recover from her loss, though Jacob and his friends soon turns out to be other than what they seem.
I think this novel is good for fans of mythical legends and fans of young adult (YA) novels with fantasy elements.
Meyer does manage to write fantasy in a very real way, so even if you're not a fan of the vampire/werewolf myths, you'll probably still like this one.
For me, the novel has its ups and downs.
I loved the second half of the novel.
That's when the action really begins, when all secrets are revealed to Bella and when the main conflict arises.
At the same time, I didn't particularly like the first half of the novel.
For 250 pages, Bella complains about the whole in her chest, the pain of losing her true love.
It took me about 4 days to read the first half of the novel, and a little over 1 day to read the second half.
Although in general, I found the book to be average at best, I will continue on to the third in the Twilight Saga.
Even though I find myself generally disappointed by the slow pace of the novels (particularly the first few hundred pages), I do find the overall story to be very interesting, and I do want to know what happens next.
The first half of the novel is very repetitious, a bit slow, and focuses intensely on depression and loss.
If that's not what you feel like reading, you may want to skip this one.
I haven't read many YA novels since I was a teenager myself, so I may not be the best judge on what makes a good YA novel.
If you're a fan of YA novels, you'll probably love this series.
If not, though, you may find it a bit disappointing, like I did.
If you read the first book, Twilight, and enjoyed it, it would be worth your while to continue on to New Moon.
I will still read the next book, because I find the overall plot to be interesting.
However, I doubt I'll be re-reading these anytime soon.
I did also find the quality of writing in this book to be improved upon since the last one.
Besides the over-repeated phrase, "whole in my chest," in my opinion, the writing is of a better quality than the first novel.