I’ve finally done it. A year after all the frantic excitement over the release of Breaking Dawn, and I’ve finally finished the Twilight series. When the last book was released I hadn’t read any of them yet, and I felt obliged to see what this outrageously popular phenomenon was all about.

I still don’t get it.

When I finished Twilight and New Moon  back in December I had to see how it would all end. And now that I’m at the finish line, it was incredibly anticlimactic. The confrontation that threatened to boil over with the Volturi, governing body of all vampires, was drawn out and unsatisfying. The sexual tension between Jacob Black, Werewolf and Edward Cullen, Vampire as they fight for the love of Bella was painfully angst-ridden and downright creepy by the end.

In the third book, Eclipse, the consequences of Edward’s abandonment in the 2nd book are felt now that Bella and Jacob have become so attached. The crux of that book, to me, was their tormented attachment to each other. Too many hearts left dangling, too many endless conversations about feelings, far too much understanding from Edward. Bella basically has 2 boyfriends in this book, one of them under the guise of friendship, and it takes hundreds of pages for anyone to put their foot down and ask her to choose. Even when she does, her other suitor is still hanging around all the time. And of course in the background of all this is a bloodthirsty femme fatale vampire dead set on destroying Bella and the Cullens with a legion of wild newborn vampires tearing through Seattle. When that is the subplot and the Main Event is a wordy love triangle between teenagers, I can’t help but feel a little cheated.

Then in the grand finale that is Breaking Dawn, when all things should be revealed, tied together, won or lost, it just fizzles out into nothing. There’s a wedding with tortured unrequited love. There’s a pregnancy and birth that is possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read. Our jilted suitor finds love in the ickiest place imagineable. And  *spoiler warning* when it’s finally time for the Cullens and werewolves to have a showdown with the Volturi and end this plotline once and for all, both sides gather an army and meet in a field…to chat. No one fights. They talk it out. Endlessly. And then…leave. And everyone lives happily ever after. Everyone gets what they want. After making it through the rest of the series like a trooper, this is what I get? This is how it ends? With a chat?

I was very unsatisfied.