NEW MOON REVIEW By Veronica Blake

New Moon, the second movie in the hugely popular Twilight Saga, had to fulfill great expectations.  The first movie, Twilight, was immensely successful, but with a different director, Chris Wietz, for the second installment, there has been a lot of speculation about the outcome of this new movie. 

Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan opens the movie with a heart-wrenching scene as she dreams that she is introducing her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, to her grandmother.  But, she is looking into a mirror and the woman is not her grandmother; she is looking at herself as an old woman.  Standing at her side, Edward is still young and vibrant.  When she wakes up, it is the day Bella has been dreading – her eighteenth birthday – she is now older than Edward, who will be forever seventeen. After a tragic mishap at her birthday party, Edward decides that he must leave to keep Bella safe.  The grief that Bella suffers after losing Edward is agonizing to watch and the passing of time is dramatically represented by the changing seasons outside of Bella’s bedroom window as she sits unmoving in a chair.  Although, it is understandable that she would have terrible nightmares because of her deep depression, her hoarse-sounding screams in these scenes are just annoying.

The realization that she can see images of Edward or hear his voice whenever she does something dangerous sends Bella on a series of reckless escapades in her quest to keep his memory alive.  One scene has her hopping on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle, which seems senseless and completely out of place.  Yet, another scene where she cliff dives in an attempt to glimpse his illusion again, you are immersed in Bella’s desperate quest so deeply that you feel like you are drowning, too.

There is plenty of eye candy in the form of the half-dressed ‘wolf pack’ and especially in the nicely developed muscles of seventeen year old Taylor Lautner, who plays sixteen year old Jacob Black, Bella’s childhood friend from the local Quileute Reservation. Jacob’s hopeless devotion to Bella and his unwanted werewolf affliction will definitely tug relentlessly at your heart-strings. The transformation of the pack from human form to wolf form is spectacular and action scenes with the wolves are exciting and fast-paced.  A scene where Jacob and Paul are fighting one another in their wolf forms will have you biting your nails!

Robert Pattison is perfect once again as the tortured love-sick hero. His expressions of pain speak a thousand words in every glance as he portrays 109 year old vampire, Edward Cullen.  For Edward fanatics like myself, his anguish over leaving Bella was pure torture and seeing him through most of the movie as only mist-like images was done well enough that I could endure his absence.   One scene, however, showing Alice – Edward’s vampire sister – having a vision of the future where Bella and Edward are running through the forest dressed like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever was too far-fetched for even a hard-core fan like myself.

If you have not read the books, parts of New Moon will be hard to follow.  I am an avid reader of the series, so I thoroughly know the plot, but seeing the action on the big screen is an added bonus.  As described in the book, but not mentioned in the movie, vampires have skin that is as hard and smooth as marble.  The final fight scene in Italy with the Volturi - the terrifying vampire royalty – shows Edward being thrown against the hard marble floor, causing his cheek to develop cracks just like the floor he has crashed against...a stunning and unexpected special effect that left me breathless.

Being an ‘older’ woman, I do not fit into the target audience for the Twilight books or the movies.  Stephanie Meyer wrote the books for teens, yet, the overpowering love story spans all ages. It has reminded me, and probably other mature women like me, of long forgotten dreams that we all had as young girls about love – true love, the kind that is so powerful that it will last for eternity – a love that you would die for if necessary.  The Twilight Saga is a fantasy...it is a romantic escape interlaced with unspeakable dangers and ancient legends, and we love it!

Review by author Veronica Blake author of BLACK HORSE.
Was there any warrior more handsome, more virile than the powerful young war chief bathing naked in the river? Meadow was certain she'd never forget the sight of his lean hips, his sinewed thighs and bronzed chest. He was all that a Sioux maiden could want in a mate. But though she'd been raised in the village, Meadow was not really one of the People. Her parents had been white, and her past would bring unexpected disaster upon her band of Oglala.

She was his to love, her flaxen hair shining like gold on the furs as he stroked her sweet body. But when she was ripped from his arms after a single night as his wife, Black Horse swore he would rescue her from the pony soldiers. Even if he lost his own freedom, his life, he would gaze one more time into the beautiful jade green eyes of the woman who possessed his soul.
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Black Horse (Leisure Historical Romance)