[This article was originally written/published on August 6th of 2020. It’s the first book review I have ever written. I have not edited any of the phrasing or grammar mistakes because it’s hilarious.]
Calling Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer a disappointment would infer that I believed that the book would be good in the first place. Like so many others, I grew up with Twilight and enjoyed it. Before I found the likes of Shelley and Austen, women like Meyer and Rowling enthralled me in their imperfect fantasies. The latter of these women being my main source of disappointment has become a constant, Meyer just blindsided me! I was unaware of Midnight Sun until Meyer’s announcement made on the 4th of May 2020, although I had heard of leaked chapters and publishing setbacks in the past. Leading up to the novel being released, just two days ago, my other Twi-hard gal-pals and I were elated. We preordered the books, we reminisced about Team Jacob memorabilia and counted down the days until we’d be able to get the books in our hands and relive the magic.
When I marched into my local Barnes and Noble on August 4th, 2020, a stack of hardcover Midnight Sun books sat exclusively on a table right by the checkout. My friend Samantha and I quickly grabbed a copy for each of us, paid nearly thirty dollars a book and were out of the door in less than five minutes. The book was heavy. Like, alarmingly large. One hundred and sixty pages longer than Twilight heavy. Before I get into the nitty gritty about what I did and didn’t like about the book, I’d like to make it apparent that I know the original Twilight series is seriously problematic. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the many issues with character portrayal in the original books (like the fact that Bella literally fainted when Edward kissed her, or the obvious, him being a stalker/murderer thing) I am just here to talk about the wonderful atrocities that we would have never had without Midnight Sun.
I think the thing that excited me most about this book was that I knew that canon couldn’t drastically change. Like many others, The Cursed Child and J.K. Rowling’s Twitter has me permanently scarred. Collectively, we were allowed to recant the things about the series we loved, reconnect with characters we freely enjoy and maybe even get to know them more. I will say, we did get to know Edward and the Cullen family a lot more. What I didn’t expect was that I was going to strongly dislike more and more characters with each chapter passing. Particularly Edward.
Edward Cullen was probably my first literary crush. I read the Harry Potter series in elementary school, so no, I wasn’t crushing on our favorite boy-wizard, I wanted to be Harry Potter, not date a Harry Potter-type. The Twilight series was different, I read the first two books when I entered the sixth grade, before anyone from the opposite sex could even tell I was a girl. Edward was my dream-boat. He noticed the plain, bookish girl and was openly in love with her. Her clumsy nature was what endeared him to her. Her shyness was intriguing. I, like so many awkward, nerdy girls my age, craved that attention. The fact that Bella ritualistically described him as perfect definitely didn’t help lower my standards for men, either. Something that I didn’t expect when reading Midnight Sun was that I’d eventually find my Original Boy Crush to be repetitive, clingy and annoying. For this, I directly blame Meyer. Realistically, the original series ended so loosely that it seemed a sequel series with Nessie and Jacob at the center was inevitable. Instead, collectively we were robbed thirty dollars a head to foolishly read a story that we already knew from the perspective of a boy we shouldn’t have found endearing in the first place. For this, I am to blame. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I knew that this book would be bad, I bought it anyway. Jo Rowling trained us for this kind of disappointment, a trap that I would fall into time and time again.
What I was most intrigued to read about were two very different events that we saw in Twilight. First, the initial classroom scene when Edward smells Bella for the first time. Secondly, in the ballet studio when Edward is forced to drink Bella’s blood in order to save her from becoming a vampire.
Having my head severed from my body seemed like a better alternative than having to continue reading the book.
Both of these retellings were the least disappointing scenes from Midnight Sun, they almost made the entire read worth it. Almost. Reading Edwards initial reaction to Bella was genuinely fun to read, he goes into so much depth about how mundane his second life is until he meets this girl and is transported into super-serial killer mode. A direct quote from page 12 is “I could snap four or five of their necks per second, I estimated. It would not be noisy. The right side would be the lucky side; they would not hear me coming.” I was hooked! This was the kind of crazy, outlandish shit I couldn’t wait to read, and for a while, this type of language was persistent. Edward was a certified freak! And his entire family knew it. I, like Emmett and Jasper, found myself waiting for Edward to snap. There had to be a reason why Stephenie Meyer wrote this, right? There had to be some ultimate secret that we didn’t know, I convinced myself this. My darkest fantasies started to form… Maybe Edward would run all the way to Alaska and kill the first human that agitated him? Maybe he’d go on some secret sex-capade in an attempt to alleviate his stress? I dunno! I’m not the author! But maybe I should be because both of those options seem a lot more exciting than the secret we got. Basically, his family was like “it’s cool if you kill her or turn her, we don’t really care either way, just stop being annoying about this.” ….Not the route I would have taken, but it did seem practical.
After Edward’s first couple weeks of deciding if he should kill Bella or not, the book started to drag. We already knew that they’d fall in love, we’ve heard that he is a sick, masochistic lion, and I’m pretty sure we read a description of Bella blushing on every other page. I started to get bored, but I knew I had to keep going. I was committed to reading the entire book, like a true fan, but I found myself getting irritated and wanting to skip ahead. In the ten years that it took for this book to get published, Stephanie Meyer did not become a better writer and her vocabulary hasn’t changed in the slightest. “Infinitesimal” isn’t the only adjective worth using, Stephenie, please get a thesaurus.
By the time I got to the blood drinking, I was too bored to even care. Edward described drinking Bella’s blood as a decapitation, and I was envious. Having my head severed from my body honestly seemed like a better alternative than having to continue reading the book (ok that’s a little extreme, but you get what I mean. I was fucking over it.) …. And there were four more chapters to go. I finished those chapters less than an hour ago and I honestly can’t tell you if there was anything worth reading within those moments.
All in all, I love the original Twilight series. I think they are so ridiculous, but they are romantic and fun and easy to enjoy, but I won’t find myself returning to Midnight Sun or recommending it to anyone because I do believe reading it was a waste of time. Anything we gained from this behemoth of a book, we could have gotten from a Tweet (Jo Rowling style!) it would have been cheaper and easier on all of us. Hopefully Stephenie Meyer will use this cash grab to settle down and spend the next decade of her life writing the sequel series we deserve.
Seriously top tier review. That classroom scene was WILD! 😂
Excellent article. I certainly appreciate this website. Stick with it!
You’re fucking hilarious.