Breaking Dawn Fans Up in Arms

Posted on August 11, 2008

Hachette Books broke records when it sold 1.3 million copies of Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, the last book in the teen vampire trilogy. But it appears that not all the fans were happy with the ending. In fact, message boards and blogs have been afire with both unhappy and happy fans who want to express their feelings about who the heroine ended up with and what happened afterwards.

The recently reopened message board on the Twilight series Web site has been very active, and on Amazon-where the novel remains ranked #1 in sales-the book has generated more than 1,600 reviews (nearly twice the reviews of the previous book, Eclipse) and more than 1,000 "customer discussions." Unhappy readers expressed a variety of opinions, including incredulity with certain plot points or the way threads were tied up, while others felt the writing wasn"t as strong as in the previous books.
In one heavily trafficked thread entitled "Unhappy with Breaking Dawn? Don't burn it-RETURN it!," commenters debated whether returning the book was a valid way to express unhappiness with the book. "Technically, reading a book and returning it is theft of knowledge," read one post, while the original commenter, a former bookstore employee, wrote, "I don't advocate making a habit of buying new books, reading them, and returning them. But once in a while... I do think mass returns are a useful form of consumer protest." Another poster recounted, anecdotally, returning the book at Borders: "They took back my book with no problem. Got into a discussion with the cashier about how I was the 15th (!!!) person to bring my book back today."

Returning books as a form of consumer protest is an interesting idea. We don't want to give any spoilers, but we have to say that we thought the last book was pretty shocking. And it definitely had an "ick" factor during one particular scene. "Any publicity is good publicity" still holds true: sales are still very, very good.