Breaking Dawn

About Breaking Dawn

Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, published in 2008. At 754 pages, it is the longest book in the series and the most structurally ambitious: the novel is divided into three parts — two narrated by Bella, with the middle section narrated by Jacob Black in first person. The story begins immediately where Eclipse left off: Bella and Edward are engaged, and the wedding takes place in the novel's opening chapters.

The honeymoon that follows — on a private island off the coast of Brazil — includes the consummation of the relationship that the preceding three novels had been building toward, and its aftermath. Bella discovers she is pregnant, and the pregnancy is rapid and dangerous: the half-vampire child is developing at an accelerated rate, breaking Bella's ribs and threatening to kill her before the birth. The sequence is visceral and was deliberately so — Meyer intended it as a horror portion of the book.

The birth itself, and Bella's near-death and transformation into a vampire, marks the series' most graphic content. Jacob's section of the novel deals with the aftermath and introduces the concept of "imprinting" — the Quileute wolf pack's involuntary bonding — in ways that generated significant controversy among both fans and reviewers.

The Final Conflict

The third portion of the novel escalates from domestic to global: the Volturi, the vampire ruling body introduced in New Moon, mobilize against the Cullens after receiving what they believe is evidence that the Cullens have created a child vampire — an illegal act. The resulting assembly of vampire witnesses from around the world and the standoff at the end of the novel makes for a markedly different conclusion than the previous volumes, less about interpersonal drama than ideological conflict.

Why It Has Been Challenged

Breaking Dawn is the most banned book in the Twilight Saga, with 24 documented challenges. Objections have centered on its sexual content — the explicit depictions of a honeymoon and the consequences of sex — as well as its graphic birth sequence, violence, and subject matter involving a teen pregnancy. The American Library Association included it on its lists of frequently challenged books during its peak years of circulation. Despite — or because of — the controversy, the novel sold over 1.3 million copies in its first 24 hours.