I tried to avoid reading the reviews of Breaking Dawn on every other LDS Mommy Blog (haha, SeriouslySoBlessed!) but now that I've finished the book I've read a few of them and HOLY FREAKING COW. Settle down, y'all. It's a book. No one has forced you to read it. Stephenie has not let you down personally by not writing it exactly as you would have liked. Ugh.
Those people freaking out about BD are just as annoying as those refusing to read it because of its popularity.
Anyway, I loved that whole Book Two: Jacob bit.
(Yeah, I'm not opinionated at all at 3 a.m. *eyeroll* I'll go back to watching Flight of the Conchords videos and Googling pictures of Raymond Burr.)
I love what Stephenie said about all the brouhaha:
It makes me sad, of course, but I was expecting it. The negative was more than I was braced for, but that was because the book sold a lot more copies than I expected. It was bigger than I thought it would be on both the positive and the negative sides.
It's inevitable that the bigger your audience gets, the bigger the group who doesn't like what they're reading will be. Because no book is a good book for everyone. Every individual has their own personal taste and experience, and that's why there are such a great variety of books on the shelves. There are lots of very popular books that I don't enjoy at all. Conversely, there are books that I adore that no one else seems to care about. The surprise to me is that so many people do like my books. I wrote them for a very specific audience of one, and so there was no guarantee that any other person on the planet besides me would enjoy them.
When I publish a book, I know that it's not going to be right for every person who picks it up. With Breaking Dawn, the expectation was so huge and so intense that I knew the negative reaction was going to be especially bad this time. In the end, it's just a book. No book—or album, or movie, or tv show, or any other kind of entertainment—can answer to that level of expectation. Oh, it might do it for some people, it might be exactly what they were looking for. But there's always going to be another group who was looking for something else.
It's a hard thing to have people unhappy with you, but there's nothing I can do. Either Breaking Dawn entertains you or it doesn't. If I could go back in time, knowing everything I know right now, and write the whole series again, I would write exactly the same story. (The writing would be better, though—practice makes perfect.) This is the story I wanted to write, and I love Breaking Dawn. It's everything I wanted in the last novel of my saga. People's reactions don't change that.
2 comments:
LOL I totally agree. And I loved Book Two, too. I found Jacob hilarious, loved his chapter titles! lol
I liked BD. I can see some of the points people are making, it wasn't what I expected either and I think it could have been better if there were a few things different, but I still think it was a good book; I enjoyed it, and I feel satisfied with the end of the story.
I would really like to hear more from Jacob, maybe if she'd go back and rewrite New Moon from his POV. Have you heard about Midnight Sun? Someone leaked what she had already and now it's put on hold "indefinitely". Bummer.
Anyhow. Yay! You finished! :)
Thanks for telling it as it is, Susannah. I am relying on you to keep us all up. I am up at 6:00 heading to work on Labor Day too. I'll be thinking of you. Dad
(Dad, if you keep commenting with your last name [which I've asked you not to] I'm going to continue to have to delete your comments, sheesh, haha.)
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