Midnight Sun Review

Alright, here we are at the end of the Twilight saga or I suppose the beginning since this Twilight from Edward’s POV. . . and I still have to get to the Bree Tanner novella.

Eh, let’s skip the accuracies of my statements and get into Midnight Sun. There’s no need to go over plot so I’ll get straight to my thoughts. What was it like to see Twilight from Edward’s perspective?

I’m sorry Edward fans but I wanted to throw the book across the room.

Alright, maybe I just find Twilight a slog because it did take me more days to read it compared to its sequels. Same with Life and Death. But Edward’s internal monologue made it even worse for me.

He is just so melodramatic and repetative. It felt like every sentence was his agony over being a monster, how much he wants Bella but knowing he shouldn’t risk her life because he’s a monster. Yet he can’t help himself and justifies his actions that allow him to get closer to her, and then beats himself up about it. Every sentence, every page, I get it already, I GET IT NOW SHUT UP! The self loathing is just incessent. Instead of feeling sympathy, I just felt the above.

And since I have already the story twice, I wasn’t enagaged because I already knew what was going to happen. No Hades/Persephone allusions could make this better.

I do admire how Meyer makes Edward’s POV as distinct as she does with Bella and Jacob. She has Edward’s upbringing in the 1900s inform his personality and language. You can tell that he’s an older soul with his beliefs on morality, and sophiscated language.

Plus there are new scenes that we weren’t in the original as Bella wasn’t present for these, the flashbacks and more historical exposition on Edward’s and the Cullens past that were far more interesting.

In fact, I sort of wish this book was like Divergent’s Four novel. It was a full-scale story but a set of novellas depicting important parts of Tobias’ life that informed his character in the trilogy. This could have been done with Midnight Sun easily as the flashbacks each could have been its own novella, sewn together to his first sight of Bella.

Such scenes included Carlisle and Edward’s first Christmas together, appreciating how hard Carlisle tries to provide some humanity to their immortal lives. We see how important the vegetarian diet it is and how much Edward looks up to him while also meeting his first temptation in the form of Siobhan’s disdain toward Carlisle’s life that makes Edward question if there can be more.

We also see Edward’s vigilante vampire days which were so cool and how the weight of those murders started to drain him (irony, right), making him jaded about humanity and bringing him back to Esme and Carlisle’s lifestyle.

Then there is also more depth to the Cullens especially Rosalie. They are great foils as both understand the desperate desire to be human again, she agrees he’s a monster, and they’re both selfish (though Edward’s more self righteous that he’s not petty as Rosalie when he so is). They fight throughout the book and Edward basically disowns her in his mind because she doesn’t like Bella, but the moments when they have honest conversations and show their sibling bond is powerful.

There’s also scenes mentioned in Twilight but are given more depth here as Bella skips over Edward’s interrogation, not believing that she’s interesting. Here, we get to see that she is! They talk about her favorite books, movies, memories with her mother, her dreams to work in publishing or the English field. As Edward said, Bella doesn’t give herself enough credit. But I wish we had more of this personality in her during the actual books.

Then again, this might be Edward putting her on a pedestal. As Edward can’t read Bella’s thoughts, he assumes that she must be entirely selfless and pure when we readers know she’s obsessing over Edward as much as Edward is obssessing over her. It’s sorta funny in that sense. But I think it gave Bella’s doubts about whether Edward wouldn’t want her to be a vampire some truth to it. He praises her so much for being such a fragile, pure human compared to his monsterous, sparkly immortality. If she had been a vampire who he couldn’t read her mind, I doubt he would have been as interested because vampires are damned in his mind.

Okay, I may have been ragging on Edward a bit and his monologue did not help soften my feelings toward seeing his greatness but he did have some good points like him orchestrating Angela and Ben’s romance with Emmet. There was some self-congratulatory, self-righteous bent to it per usual, but I enjoyed it. Same with the praying scene in church after Bella is in the hospital where Edward prays to the divine being that he isn’t even sure exists for him. It was just powerful.

Twihard fans and Edward fangirls will love this book but I found it didn’t add anything to the universe and wish most of the pages had been cut for something more original.