Breaking Dawn Chapter One: So it begins.

Okay, so I skipped the Eclipse review to get right to Breaking Dawn. Can you really blame me? The fans demanded Breaking Dawn updates, and I intend to deliver. But in short, Eclipse was actually way better than Twilight or New Moon. It wasn't good, but it wasn't really that painful either. Condense all of these books into one, use the James/Victoria revenge plot as the main conflict throughout, and have the big werewolf/vampire battle as your climax, and you probably have one acceptably decent genre book worth of material here. Assuming you found someone who could write to be the author, of course.

So anyway, it's time for a Breaking Down of Breaking Dawn (I'm hilarious). Bella is engaged, and everyone is starring at her brand new car. Now, why would they do something like that? Well, it's a darkly-tinted Mercedes. A Mercedes Guardian. You can skip to about the 3:15 mark of that video to see some of what this car (known in the real world as the S-Guard) is capable of withstanding. Okay, so there's no flamethrower action in the video, but they do shoot at it and try to blow it up! And yes, according to Wikipedia, it really is heavily armored:

Special features include the capability to withstand military-grade small arms fire and certain explosive devices, a self-sealing fuel tank, and a special alarm system.

So, yeah, quite a car Bella's got there. Turns out that Edward has given here two cars to replace her broken down truck; the before car (the Guardian), and an after car that she gets to see once she's a vampire. See, the before car is there so she doesn't get herself killed before then. Hilarious!

In other local news, there are lots of missing person fliers up all over the place for Jacob. Of course, most of La Push knows the deal, and so does Bella, but Charlie was very concerned for Jake. With that in mind, he had posters put up in every town within a 100-mile radius, but of course this is all for naught. Jacob is off being a wolf, so he's not so much missing as AWOL. The overall lack of concern bothers Charlie, because he's pretty much the only one not in the loop here. This is something imperfect about Bella's world, so you can expect it to change sometime in the next 750 pages. Oh yeah, this book is obscenely long.

Bella calls Seth looking for an update. Of course, the other wolves can still hear and feel him, even if he's trying not to act humany. Seems like he's hanging out in northern Canada, where he plans to become the world's greatest werewolf curler. More importantly, he's not coming home anytime soon, as far as Seth can tell. Seth and his mom will be at the wedding though, even if the rest of the wolves aren't exactly fans of her inter-species relationship.

Bella thinks back to the night she and Edward told Charlie about the wedding. Flashback time! Everyone make the Wayne's World flashback noise...

Bella and Edward wait on the loveseat in the Swan living room as Charlie gets home. Edward rushes to tell Charlie the good news, but Bella wants to wait until Chief Swan puts away his gun first.

Anyway, Charlie can tell there's a big announcement coming, and since Bella looks so nervous, he jumps right to pregnancy. And why wouldn't he? Bella's right on this one; it's really the first reason why two 18-year-olds would be getting married anyway. But of course, Bella's not pregnant. That would mean that a guy who has been dead for nearly a century impregnated her with some sort of mutant human-baby hybrid. And that's ridiculous.

Once the truth comes out though, Charlie's still not exactly happy. Oh, he knew it was coming eventually, and he can't be as furious as he would be were there a freakish baby on the way, but still -- they're just finishing up high school! Isn't this all happening a little fast?

Bella decides not to tell him about the whole "and after we're married, I'm becoming a vampire" part. Probably smart.

After he comes to grip with the fact that this really is happening, Charlie begins laughing. Not a happy laugh, but the kind the evil, maniacal kind you expect from Bond villains. For Charlie has realized that Bella will have to deal with the true horror: she gets to tell Mom about the wedding. Um, okay. The part with her telling her mom is kind of boring. Bella doesn't want to repeat her mother's mistakes, but Renee sees that things are different between Bella and Edward, so she's cool with it, and that's pretty much that. This was a really lame flashback.

Anyway, back to present day. Alice is giving Charlie and Bella their final fits for their respective wedding attire. Bella really doesn't want to deal with all this, so Alice tells her to go to her happy place during the fitting. Bella's happy place is imagining what it's going to be like when she finally forces Edward to have sex with her before she becomes a sparkle goddess.

This book is going to be amazing, and not in a good way.