I think this officially marks the end of the week of finishing my bingo-inspired bad choices. Well let’s be honest, I can’t really blame bingo for this one.
Allow me to thoroughly embarrass myself for a moment:15 years ago, I was really into Twilight. I mean really into it, in a pre-ordering-the-books-as-they-came-out, getting-involved-in-fandom-on-LiveJournal,-reading-and-writing-fanfiction,-taking-the-train-to-Belgium-to-watch-the-movie-on-opening-weekend-because-it-took-a-couple-of-months-for-it-to-get-to-the-theater-in-France kind of way. And to be honest, I regret nothing. I made some pretty good friends during that time and even if I can acknowledge all the problematic things about it, I loved the book for what it was and what the fans made of it, and it was always going to hold a special place in my heart, even if I never felt the need to re-visit it.
So fast forward to 2020 when Stephenie Meyer decided to finally release the full Midnight Sun. My young and innocent self had read the leaked manuscript excerpt a decade ago, and I remember really enjoying it, so I bit the bullet and bought it. Then proceeded to completely ignore the existence of this book in my shelves for a year. I expected to feel nostalgic, but I am definitely not the same person I was 15 years ago, so I was kind of afraid this book would ruin it for me. And boy, was I right.
This book suffers from a dire lack of editing. It’s just so unnecessarily long. I’m not joking: sitting at 658 pages, I see no reason why it should have gone over 350. It dragged. I thought it dragged, and as you can see from the length of my reviews, it’s not like I’m opposed to long-winded texts in general.
I don’t know, guys, I just feel like for the amount of words I was forced to read through, there was little to no new information that added anything to the story. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone who hasn’t read Twilight would pick up this book to start with, so technically we’re already working from a known tale. I expected this book to give me some new context, some more Cullen pre-Bella interaction, or at the very least, a new spin on the story. But that’s not what happens: we basically get the entirety of Twilight verbatim and nothing else (even the parts where Edward was not present for in Twilight get recounted to us because he’s eavesdropping on someone’s thoughts, or watching them through video ¬¬), and some long-winded tangents that add nothing to the story with a sprinkle of of just how much of a creep Edward really is. And by a sprinkle, imagine someone just added a full kilo of salt to your cup of soup. I mean yikes.
So really, if you’ve read Twilight, you really don’t need to read this. And if you haven’t, why would you want to?
If you’re also feeling nostalgic about simpler times when you were a young thing reading Twilight for the first time, go back and re-read it and allow yourself to ignore all the problematic parts of it because it is fun. Don’t pick this one up, it’ll ruin the entire franchise for you. 🙁
Bingo: OLD SERIES
