Meyer seems to say that he’s too much of a vampire and too little of a human to refrain from doing them (a flawed argument itself). But it does describe Edward’s interior conflict as he makes those bad choices. He was creepy and domineering, and the couple’s dynamic was toxic. He followed her out of town, infantilized her and stalked her when he worried about her health. He hid in Bella’s bedroom at night to watch her sleep. One of the biggest criticisms leveled at Twilight, particularly in the MeToo era, is that Edward was wildly controlling.
Bella was a damsel in distress who submitted to the otherworldly appeal of her decades-older boyfriend. The blood flows more freely here, even if it never quite spills.ĭespite its status as a pop cultural phenomenon, Twilight was ultimately a chaste tale of forbidden love, further complicated by a steep imbalance of power. Although it was Bella’s story that launched more than a decade’s worth of young adult sci-fi and dystopian heroines, it turns out the narrative power-and compelling internal drama-was on Edward’s side all along. But it is more complex, more sophisticated and less innocent than Twilight. I can’t say that Midnight Sun is a good book. And the major flaws of the Twilight series-its depiction of a problematic romance, its turgid prose and its careless treatment of Indigenous characters-remain. The dialogue and plot twists will feel familiar to anyone who has read the original book or seen the movie. And though it’s always dangerous to return to past guilty pleasures, I was not (totally) disappointed.įirst, it should go without saying that 658 pages of excruciatingly detailed vampire thirst makes for a dull and likely unsettling read if you’re not already a Twi-hard, or at least a casual fan. The teen fan inside me was eager to revisit Meyer’s brooding vampire world to see how it all turned out. This month, over a decade later, Meyer published Midnight Sun in full-and set off a debate about how it stacks up against the original. Where Twilight, like Bella, was straightforward and rather naive, Midnight Sun was dynamic and messy. And soon I discovered the early draft of Midnight Sun, the novel told from Edward’s perspective, which leaked online in 2008.
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