Book Review: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella

I've always loved being able to hold a book in my hands and snuggle up on the sofa, ready to do hours of reading. Slowly seeing your progress through the book makes you excited to read more and I love not being able to put down a book because it's just so gripping.

I must admit that I am a fan of the Twilight books and I have purchased all of the Twilight series. I have seen the first and second films and was left sorely disappointed as they don't do the books any justice at all. The ridiculous craze surrounding the film's characters tends to take away from the story a lot and gives the books a bad name. Anyway, when I saw the latest release, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella, from Stephanie Meyer, I have to say I was interested. It has been cleverly designed to look like a Twilight book and is actually based around a character that briefly appears in the Eclipse story..but that is where the connections end. If any fans pick up this book expecting to find Twilight part 2, they will be bitterly disappointed.

As I mentioned above, I love the feeling of reading and holding a physical copy of the book but I decided that this review was going to be a little different as I decided to try reading this latest release through the book's official website. I decided to do this because the £6 price tag in my local Sainburys supermarket didn't seem worth it as the book looked extremely thin, and is probably something I could finish in a day. This review will be of the ever growing trend that is e-books as well as the new book.

The book starts off well as we meet Bree and her local vampire 'gang.' I don't want to give too much of the story away but for the Vamp fans out there that are reading, there is a good amount of Vampire hunting in the first fourty or so pages, but by this point I was starting to wonder where Bree came from and who she really was. I must admit, I was getting pretty impatient and annoyed..not because the book was so boring, but because it is extremely difficult to 'snuggle' up on the sofa with a huge laptop that burns your legs. By this point I had also noticed that there are no chapters within this book which in my opinion is just too damn weird, and there is no way of bookmarking where you have stopped reading so you'll just have to remember which page number you were on!

While reading this book it all seemed kind of pointless. It could have been written from the viewpoint of Riley or Victoria, or even one of the other Cullens, which probably would have made it a tad more interesting but not much. We followed Bree as she struggled with newborn life, acted a bit ditsy as she tried to figure out what her vampy skills were with her male companion and was blindly led to fight the Cullen coven and then it was all over.

I'm all for online versions of newspapers and magazines but online versions of books just don't work. There is just nothing better than reading a physical copy of a book, seeing the front cover and back cover artwork and how can you fill your bookshelves with e-books?

The book was so short at just 178 pages that there wasn't enough of a story to really sink your teeth into (excuse the pun). The whole thing seemed like a waste of time, created purely to keep the Twilight craziness bubbling and money in the author's pocket.