Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew up… in Chicago, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The child of a successful lawyer, Edward had a comfortable life, attending private school and playing the piano. But then the Spanish Flu epidemic wiped out his family and almost him, too. Luckily, Edward's doctor was a vampire, who saved the seventeen-year-old's life by turning him into one too.
Living… in a beautiful home in Forks, Washington, with the rest of his adopted family. The doctor who saved him, Carlisle, has gathered a group of fellow “vegetarian” vampires who drink animal blood rather than human. They pose as a family, with Carlisle working as a doctor and the younger vampires attending school.
Profession… high school student – for the last few decades. Because of his youthful apparance, Edward has attended high school over and over. Now, he aces classes without even trying.
Interests… playing the piano, literature and learning foreign languages.
Relationship Status… trying to remain single. Edward is drawn to human student Bella Swan, but is afraid he might give in to his vampiric instincts. He can’t seem to stay away, and secretly, his family wants him to find someone special. Even more attractive than Bella's blood is the fact that while normally Edward can read the thoughts of everyone around him, Bella’s mind is impenetrable.
Challenge… trying not to hurt Bella. He already tries hard enough to resist the lure of drinking blood, and he doesn’t want to draw her into the dangerous supernatural world, especially since she's so accident-prone. As he tells her, “Don’t be offended, but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So… try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?”
Personality… old-fashioned, stubborn, caring. Edward still adheres to the turn of the (twentieth) century conventions he was brought up with, and is by turns romantic and controlling. He has a tendency to brood, convinced that he lost his soul when he became a vampire. But he isn’t all serious, and enjoys fast cars and sarcastic banter as much as he does classical music.
Get to Know him in...
-
Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger as Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob, knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella is confronted with the most important decision of her life.
-
Forks, Washington resident Bella Swan is reeling from the departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen, and finds comfort in her friendship with Jacob Black, a werewolf. But before she knows it, she's thrust into a centuries-old conflict, and her desire to be with Edward at any cost leads her to take greater and greater risks.
-
When Bella Swan moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to live with her father, she starts school and meets the reclusive Edward Cullen, a mysterious classmate who reveals himself to be a 108-year-old vampire. Despite Edward's repeated cautions, Bella can't help but fall in love with him, a fatal move that endangers her own life when a coven of bloodsuckers try to challenge the Cullen clan.
-
The new found married bliss of Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen is cut short when a series of betrayals and misfortunes threatens to destroy their world. Bella soon discovers she is pregnant, and during a nearly fatal childbirth, Edward finally fulfills her wish to become immortal. But the arrival of their remarkable daughter, Renesmee, sets in motion a perilous chain of events that pits the Cullens and their allies against the Volturi, the fearsome council of vampire leaders, setting the stage for an all-out battle.
-
After the birth of Renesmee, the Cullens gather other vampire clans in order to protect the child from a false allegation that puts the family in front of the Volturi.
-
Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York—not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest. A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin's Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him? A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael's search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro's truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness.
-
A retired ex-cop and private detective gets mixed up in murder when he is asked to deliver blackmail money and walks into a 20 year old case involving the mysterious disappearance of an actress' former husband.
