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BREAKING DAWN
By Stephanie Meyer
Little, Brown, 756 pages, $23.99

Authors can be grouchy, envious, cynical people, and I'm often one of them. In the case of Breaking Dawn, the fourth novel in Stephanie Meyer's young adult vampire series, there's quite a list of things for the jealous author to grouch about. A sampling: Meyer never wanted to be a writer. The idea for her wildly successful vampire series came to her in a dream. She needs to be close to her three, under-10 sons when she's writing. Her books have sold eight million copies in four years, mostly to teenaged girls and their mothers. There's a major motion picture coming in December. Her vampires stole #1 on the New York Times bestseller list from a certain Boy Wizard. The word "breathless" is used approximately 23 times in jacket blurbs for Breaking Dawn.

But really, despite my grouchiness, I wanted to be breathless too. I wanted the story to sweep me back to the teenage years I so enjoyed (yes, really), and into one of those fantasy worlds I hate to leave.

Bella Swan is an 18-year-old human girl. She's in love with Edward Cullen, a centuries-old vampire who looks 17. Jacob Black is their age, and a werewolf. In the preceding three books, these companions have endured death, destruction and almost-love-triangle challenges. At the beginning of this book, Bella is about to marry Edward (because he won't permit himself to turn her into a vampire — or indeed to do anything of a consummatory nature — until she's Mrs. Cullen). A honeymoon follows, and an unexpected and terrifying pregnancy. The birth of their half-breed child fans the flames of ancient conflicts, and werewolves and vampires must unite to defend their lives and families.

It's Bella herself who sums up this book, and the reason why so many readers will love it and so many others will grind their (blunt, human) teeth over it: "Edward had always thought that he belonged to the world of horror stories. Of course, I'd known he was dead wrong. It was obvious that he belonged here. In a fairy tale."

This fairy tale is pure Disney, without a whiff of Grimm. These are nice vampires. Edward's coven doesn't drink human blood — just animal — and while vampire sex does get mentioned, it is always marital and never depicted. And like all vintage Disney, the story is driven by the wish-fulfilment facet of escapism — because really, what insecure teenage girl wouldn't want to wake up one day and see a beautiful woman in the mirror? What girl wouldn't want to freeze her life forever when she's young and in love with the perfect guy?

Ah, the perfect guy. Edward is more angel than man. His eyes are "buttery, burning gold." ("Like pancakes?" a friend of mine wondered.) He's unbearably beautiful, intense, immortal, and he adores her. Bella spends hundreds of pages thinking she doesn't deserve to be his wife or Jacob's friend — though her first-person narration is occasionally dry and wry enough to mitigate the whining.

As for Jacob: The moment his point-of-view took over, in Book II, I was relieved. He can't stand Edward's melodramatic self-flagellation. He is often puzzled by and impatient with his own love for Bella. And his snide, hurt observations make these things seem poignant, rather than overblown.

The story's most compelling sequence is the birth of Bella's child, and Bella's subsequent transformation into a vampire. Though the writing elsewhere in the book is simply serviceable, here it is vivid and sensory, if not quite sensual. There are some grotesque details: blood that's actually shudder-inducing, a sense of elemental menace.

And the descriptions of Bella's newly heightened senses are lovely: the taste of the air, the clarity of wood grain, the rising-falling sound of a car radio on the distant freeway. (Edward's taste/smell is, of course, "honey-lilac-sunshine.") There are a very few instances of real romance and quiet insight, among all the idealized ones. Bella describes seeing Edward with her vampire vision for the first time: "I gasped and then struggled with my vocabulary, unable to find the right words. I needed better words." And the birth of her child: "All I knew was loving my little nudger inside of me. Outside of me, she seemed like something I must have imagined."

Mostly, though, the story's emotional intensity is relentless, and all of it — light or dark — is rendered at the same fever pitch. The most consuming love — until tomorrow, when it'll get even better. The most consuming pain — until tomorrow, when it'll get even worse. Bella, whose human self is bumbling, always blushing and a terrible driver, becomes the strongest, most beautiful, most confident vampire ever. Jacob, who begins the tale impatient and cranky, also ends up in a new, exalted state.

There are moments of reading pleasure, as Bella discovers and revels in her new powers, and Jacob's transformation heralds an important (and unintentionally creepy) plot point — but their metamorphoses irrevocably sever real from ideal, and sap the story of what little tension it possessed. Human foibles vanish and the characters are relieved, even ecstatic to see them go. There's no sense of loss, of any sacrifice made, so the ecstasy feels fevered-but-flat, just like everything else. And by the time the big showdown comes — sort of — at page 679, it doesn't seem to matter.

It might be unreasonable to expect a young-adult vampire romance novel to be anything other than hyper-intense. But what it left me with was this thought: Readers are permitted to be breathless, but stories aren't.

Caitlin Sweet's second and most recent fantasy novel was "The Silences of Home". She will be finished her third any year now.