'The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner' by Stephanie Meyer, 6/19/10

One of the things I adore most about Stephanie Meyer is her ability to see every side of the story. Many authors will write from the point of view of several characters in a book, but they way Stephanie does it is something I haven’t seem, or noticed before.

In this novella, Stephanie writes solely from the point of view of a newborn vampire named Bree. Bree is a character that shows up for only a few pages in her third Twilight book, ‘Eclipse.’ There is nothing really remarkable about her in that book with the exception that she surrenders her fight after it is offered to her by the Cullen clan only to be killed by the Volturi a short time later.

The novella describes what Bree’s life was like as a newborn that lives with a large group of other volatile newborns. It talks about what they are taught, told and expected to believe about their new life and eventually about their enemies.

It is a short story, only about 180 pages. But in those pages you get a sense of what most newborn vampires are like and how uneducated about their new life they really are, especially when the other older newborns lie to them about everything. You get to experience her journey to her death and how she accepts her fate.  She even tries to help the Cullens before she dies in her own subtle way, because of the undeserved kindness they showed.

I won’t say that its as good of a story as the Twilight’ saga, but it’s still a good story. I read this in about 2 hours and it was worth the effort.  If you enjoyed the Twilight books, you should definitely read this as well.