Midnight Sun

Midnight Sun Book Review by Stephenie Meyer 

Oh my god, you guys. 

Just. Oh. My. God. 

This book took ten years off of my life. 

As a heavy reminder, these book reviews are entirely subjective and my very personal opinion. I don’t need the hoards of Twihards coming after me with pitchforks and pretend fangs from Party City because I didn’t fall head-over-heels with this canon spinoff like my fourteen-year-old self would have. 

With that measly disclaimer out of the way, let’s move onto the actual book review. If you haven’t heard of Midnight Sun or don’t know what it is, then I don’t know what to tell you except that you avoided 600 plus pages of stream of conscious ranting. 

For those of you that would like to be enlightened, Midnight Sun is the retelling of the infamous Twilight book-yes, that Twilight, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen Twilight, complete with vampires, not so-stellar acting, and the more than notorious forest scene of Edward demanding she say… “vampire!” Gasp. 

But no really, like most women in my now mid-20’s, as a teenager, I was obsessed with the Twilight saga and everything it had to offer, especially the dreamy, chivalrous, too good to be true Edward Cullen (fuck Jacob). 

I voraciously devoured the books while I was in middle school, attended the midnight book premier for Breaking Dawn, and stayed up way too late for each and every movie screening that followed, a loyal fan to the end. To give you some perspective, I even joined the Twilight club my freshman year of high school. 

Yes, if you were wondering, I was indeed that cool. 

I was obsessed and in love and outside of Harry Potter, it’s still one of the few book fandoms and series that I was truly enveloped and consumed by. Whether that was due to my age, the experience of the fandom, the cultural phenomena that was following the movies and new releases, or for other reasons, it was an experience I look back on now with simultaneous fondness and slight embarrassment. 

I wasn’t embarrassed by my involvement or my experience in the fandom, like many other people, I made great friends through Twilight (including my best friend, whom I met in college when we mutually bonded over our love of Twilight), read countless fanfiction that, to this day, I still remember and cherish with my heart, and it was one of the series that cemented my love of reading and book culture as a whole for me. 

However, like everyone else, I inevitably grew up, matured, and my reading tastes changed and became more refined. As an avid re-reader of books, I have tried going back to re-read the Twilight saga multiple times... 

...and failed. 

The books had simply lost their magic for me. 

The story seemed dull and nonsensical, Bella had become the epitome of a Mary Sue, the writing was now apparently mediocre, and Breaking Dawn’s lackluster climax angered me to the point of speechlessness (it still does). 

So, I gave up re-reading the series and while I deemed that it was perhaps not as wonderful and life-changing as it had been for 8th grade Melissa, I still appreciated what it had done for me personally and the experiences that I had gained through the books. 

Speaking of 8th grade Melissa, the original Midnight Sun, that being twelve chapters of the original manuscript that had been leaked back in 2008, had been put up on Stephenie Meyer’s website for all to enjoy. 

Like the good, whipped fangirl I was, I devoured all 12 chapters with ease and lamented the loss of never getting more than that snapshot of Edward’s thoughts and musings. 

Now, twelve years later, the full book has been written, published, and released to the delight and downright shock to many age-old Twilight fans that had believed that series to be dead and buried, myself included. 

So, when the book came out this August, I swallowed my trepidation, knowing that my love for the characters was now long gone, but I believed that the sentimentality of 8th grade Melissa’s obsession would long linger, making this a pleasant blast from the past to lift my mood. 

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. 

Now, that I’ve told you my whole life story in an effort to explain why I have the feelings I do and to justify that I’m not just being negative for the sake of being negative, this book did not hold up to any of my expectations. 

One, it was so freaking long. 

Holy shit, was this book long. 

As I have said countless times on this blog, I like big books (and I cannot lie). It’s the best feeling in the world when you get into a story and you realize that you have many days ahead of you of being engulfed within this new world that you’ve fallen head-over-heels for. 

It’s the opposite, sinking feeling of dread when you feel like you’ve been reading the book for weeks and are getting nothing out of it. 

Midnight Sun was a lot like that.

It was too long to be good, especially considering the length was not generally driven by plot, but instead driven by Edward thinking of every fucking thing to the nth degree and driving me crazy in the process. 

Homeboy needs to take a chill pill, he overstresses, overthinks, and overanalyzes everything to the point of irritation as a reader. 

Meyer’s editor really needed to step in and say, “Hey, Stephenie...is all of this really necessary?” and then proceed to cut out at least 300 pages of nonsense. 

But that didn’t happen, probably because first and foremost, the book was already going to sell no matter what changes or edits were made, and this seemed like a book more for Stephenie than anyone else. 

It was very much stream of consciousness like I’ve already said, a style of writing defined as a literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. 

It wasn’t on the level of James Joyce’s Ulysses or other notable works, but damn was it close. 

This writing style I found abhorrently repetitive and exceptionally dull. 

Perhaps my fourteen-year-old self would have felt differently and would have sucked up anything about Edward Cullen eagerly considering he was the fictional love of my life. 

Or perhaps this book would have made me go running and screaming in the opposite direction as Edward is...kind of awful?

One positive thing I can say about this book is that it paints Bella Swan in a very rosy light, which was actually very refreshing. One of the most famous criticisms that Meyer’s has received is Bella’s lack of character, development, and attributes. 

Seeing Bella from Edward’s perspective instead of vice-versa actually showed how kind, thoughtful, and selfless she is, all things that I had never really picked up on before. 

I still find her inexcusably dumb sometimes, but much of time during this book, Bella was actually far favorable to Edward or any other character, a blasphemous statement of irony if I had ever heard one. 

The payoff, however, is Edward’s reveal as not chivalrous, not gentlemanly, and not as wonderful as I remember. He’s arrogant, selfish, obsessive, and honestly? Downright creepy. 

The stalking reaches new levels of not okay, often with him trying to justify his less than criminal activities with the notion of her “safety” as the priority, which I found complete bullshit. 

I found Edward domineering, cold, aggravating, and lackluster, statements which would literally have made my old self sob, which I honestly did when Edward left in New Moon. 

I used to be an avid Jacob hater and lover of Edward to the extreme back in the day. Now, I would weep for joy if he left, root for Jacob all the way, and hope that the horrible name of Renesmee never needed to come to fruition in the first place. 

Oh, how the turns have tabled. 

Other than the atrocious length, my other large criticism came in the form of well...the book was naturally boring in my opinion. Meyer tries to create tension and moments of suspense, but...we already know what happens. 

We know the next few years actually. We know they get married, have a baby, and Bella gets turned into a vampire. So all moments of tension and suspense are unceremoniously tossed out the window. 

You might say, typedwriter, that’s unfair! We didn’t read this for the tension and suspenseful plot that we already know! We read this to get new information and insight into the Cullens and Edward especially. What do the Cullens do at home? How do they interact? What is this juicy insider insight look like?

Well, I still don’t know because we hardly saw any of it. 

I was the most curious about the Cullens as a family unit and more information into how they functioned, interacted, and cohabited. I even wrote a fanfiction back in the day about what freaking Esme did home alone because I was so intrigued by the idea, but nope! 

Edward was always stalking Bella 24/7 so almost no new information was gleaned about the Cullens, sucks for you. 

There would be little nuggets here and there, little bouts of cool information (Apparently Esme just stays home all day every day doing….nothing?), but not nearly enough to justify a 600+ page book of a recycled plot that we were already familiar with. 

I needed more from this book, craved all the little moments in between, and it was a letdown to the most extreme proportions. 

Recommendation: I didn’t really enjoy this read despite my past involvement with the series, my lingering fondness for the movies on a cold, rainy day, and the still sporadic delves into Twilight fanfiction that maintains its reputation of quality and characters. 

Twilight will always have a special place in my heart for what it did for me and the people it brought into my life, but I wish I had remembered Midnight Sun as the 12 chapters I read on Stephenie Meyer’s website when I was fourteen and infatuated instead of 26 and uninterested and unforgiving. 

Score: 4/10