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jjk2's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
lizerature's review against another edition
4.0
There were certain moments of this book that really took me back to middle school. I read them and I was transported completely. I had a ton of realizations as an adult reading this that I hadn't grasped as a teen. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed more on the Cullen!! With Edward being in everyone's head all the time, there was definitely more going on in this one than Twilight.
Back when only the draft was posted on Stephanie Meyer's website, I used to read it over and over again because I actually liked it more than Twilight itself, but I think that had more to do with being in everybody's heads I don't have a real review for this one. I was just fangirling the entire time.
Back when only the draft was posted on Stephanie Meyer's website, I used to read it over and over again because I actually liked it more than Twilight itself, but I think that had more to do with being in everybody's heads I don't have a real review for this one. I was just fangirling the entire time.
blurrypetals's review against another edition
4.0
My O.G. shitlord lives.
My relationship with Twilight is a long and complicated thing. Without getting into it too much, I kind of sort of fell in love with reading because of this series. I was in the seventh grade in 2007, when a friend of mine recommended the first book to me and, like many others of the time, I was instantly hooked. It was the biggest book I'd ever read by myself without the help of my mom reading it out loud like she did with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Because of Twilight, I got into authors like Scott Westerfeld, Darren Shan, and, the granddaddy of all my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. The first book is still, to this day, the novel I've read the most times, sitting pretty at 5 whole times, which isn't even taking into the account the dozens of times I've skimmed the pages, memorizing the pages, the chapters titles...
My enchantment with the series died a quiet death about a year and a half later, in 2008, when the final book in the series came out and, a few months after that, the movie adaptation came out, silencing just about any enthusiasm I might have had left in me for the series as a whole.
That said, any time Stephenie Meyer has released something new, be it Twilight related or not, I've always picked it up. Apart from The Chemist, which I just haven't gotten to, I read the Bree book in 2009, I read the strange and incredibly ridiculous Life and Death in 2015, and I watched every movie adaptation as they came out, even though most of them brought me great pain. I pay respects to the roots my reading habits were born from and sometimes it's fun to revisit this ridiculous melodrama.
So that all brings us to May 2020, right? Sort of! Another thing that killed my love of the series was the Great Midnight Sun Leak of 2008. When those first 12 chapters were leaked back then, I read them, and, besides The Host, I felt it was the best thing Stephenie had ever written. It was fun, Edward made for a more interesting protagonist. Its biggest problem was that it just wasn't finished.
And now we're in 2020! One of the worst years on record and May hits us with what I consider to truly be a gift: We're finally getting Midnight Sun. It's finally finished. Our nostalgia fodder is on its way.
So what do I think about it now that it's finally here? I fucking love it, man! Besides The Host, it is still the best thing Stephenie Meyer has ever written and it was an absolute joy to read. I think this book is kind of a genius move on Stephenie's part, as it inoffensively and canonically adds context and breathes new life into the first book. Twilight as a book is now better for having this book as a companion.
I honestly wasn't sure I could ever bring myself to fangirl over anything Twilight-related ever again in my life, but my god the extra things, all the things Edward and the rest of the Cullens got up to when they weren't around Bella were all fucking great! There is a part earlier in the novel where Edward observes through his mind-reading powers that Ben and Angela each have crushes on one another but they don't really have the guts to ask the other person out, so in their Spanish class they have with Ben, Emmett asks Edward very loudly if he's asked Angela Weber out yet, and it gets Ben to finally ask Angela out and it's so fucking cute and the things it did to my heart made me think I was 12 again. There are also a lot of lovely flashbacks, including a scene about Edward's first Christmas with Carlisle that very nearly evoked a couple of tears from me.
This book was honestly the medicine I needed for the ailment that is 2020 as a year. It also made me ache in a certain way I wasn't expecting, but it was because I enjoyed this book and its nostalgia that I began to wish for something I haven't wished for so deeply since I was 14 years old: I wished Breaking Dawn was a different story.
Breaking Dawn is what dealt the heaviest blow to my enjoyment of the series, and my severe hatred of that book stems from many areas: the creepy half-vampire baby, the truly horrific pregnancy Bella goes through, the fact that it kind of sort of almost definitely condones pedophilia in a quiet yet still disturbing way, the utterly ridiculous conflict-non-conflict that is the final act of the book, and so much more. However, there is almost nothing I found more disappointing at the time than the fact that, several hundred pages spending time with these characters and their desires, Bella is turned into a vampire, and that never made sense to me, especially in Edward's story, where we are told time and time again that being a vampire in this world is basically torture for people like him and Rosalie, it never made sense to me that Bella ended up as a vampire. In all my months of theorizing how the series might end in the time between the releases ofEclipse and Breaking Dawn, I always expected for a cure for vampirism to be found and that would be how Edward and Bella would get their own small forever together. No awful pregnancy, no baby, no pedophilia, just a way for them both to get what they always wanted: to be together, have a life together.
This isn't a review of Breaking Dawn, but the reason I bring this up is I kept hoping for this book, Midnight Sun to pull a Life and Death. For the uninitiated, this means that, like the crazy gender bender, Life and Death, which, despite being nearly identical to Twilight as far as the general plot goes, has a different ending from its forefather to tie up the idea of rewriting the entire series in this new gender-bent universe, and I found myself wondering whether Stephenie might be moving toward a similar change. This book deals very much with Edward's humanity. It's more than twice as long as Twilight and much of it is added content like the Christmas with Carlisle scene I mentioned before, but much of that extra time is spent learning how Edward thinks of himself, how he wants to be, what he wishes were different, and his desire to live a human life and, moreover, to let Bella live a human life, is extremely powerful. It makes the fact that she's turned in Breaking Dawn even more disappointing. There was a part about halfway through this book where Edward listens to Alice's mind as she has a vision of Bella's future as a vampire, and I genuinely felt crestfallen by the idea, even though I have known her fate for over a decade now.
We get to see how Edward views Bella and, on top of that, we get to hear their conversations in much greater detail than before. It honestly was wonderful, finally getting to see what he sees in her, and I really do see it. Bella is actually really cute and funny in this book in all of the added content and I found myself appreciating her as a character in a way I had never done before.
I would be excited and interested to read the rest of the series from Edward's point of view, especially if Jake Abel, who translated beautifully from an actor on the screen to an actor on an audiobook, returned as the narrator. I would really like to see the events of New Moon in particular through his eyes. He is a genuinely fun and interesting protagonist and I would relish in just about anything else Stephenie might feel like adding to his story.
This was a really fun, melodramatic, and honestly really cute adventure. I'm truly delighted that Stephenie Meyer finally got to release it after not only the leak that happened in 2008, but also how, as soon as she decided to get back to this in 2015, E.L. James decided to release her own "first book told from the main guy's POV" book in Grey, delivering what I can only imagine to be a devastatingly demoralizing blow.
She finally wrote the thing and it's pretty fucking good. Good on ya, Steph. Good on ya.
My relationship with Twilight is a long and complicated thing. Without getting into it too much, I kind of sort of fell in love with reading because of this series. I was in the seventh grade in 2007, when a friend of mine recommended the first book to me and, like many others of the time, I was instantly hooked. It was the biggest book I'd ever read by myself without the help of my mom reading it out loud like she did with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Because of Twilight, I got into authors like Scott Westerfeld, Darren Shan, and, the granddaddy of all my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. The first book is still, to this day, the novel I've read the most times, sitting pretty at 5 whole times, which isn't even taking into the account the dozens of times I've skimmed the pages, memorizing the pages, the chapters titles...
My enchantment with the series died a quiet death about a year and a half later, in 2008, when the final book in the series came out and, a few months after that, the movie adaptation came out, silencing just about any enthusiasm I might have had left in me for the series as a whole.
That said, any time Stephenie Meyer has released something new, be it Twilight related or not, I've always picked it up. Apart from The Chemist, which I just haven't gotten to, I read the Bree book in 2009, I read the strange and incredibly ridiculous Life and Death in 2015, and I watched every movie adaptation as they came out, even though most of them brought me great pain. I pay respects to the roots my reading habits were born from and sometimes it's fun to revisit this ridiculous melodrama.
So that all brings us to May 2020, right? Sort of! Another thing that killed my love of the series was the Great Midnight Sun Leak of 2008. When those first 12 chapters were leaked back then, I read them, and, besides The Host, I felt it was the best thing Stephenie had ever written. It was fun, Edward made for a more interesting protagonist. Its biggest problem was that it just wasn't finished.
And now we're in 2020! One of the worst years on record and May hits us with what I consider to truly be a gift: We're finally getting Midnight Sun. It's finally finished. Our nostalgia fodder is on its way.
So what do I think about it now that it's finally here? I fucking love it, man! Besides The Host, it is still the best thing Stephenie Meyer has ever written and it was an absolute joy to read. I think this book is kind of a genius move on Stephenie's part, as it inoffensively and canonically adds context and breathes new life into the first book. Twilight as a book is now better for having this book as a companion.
I honestly wasn't sure I could ever bring myself to fangirl over anything Twilight-related ever again in my life, but my god the extra things, all the things Edward and the rest of the Cullens got up to when they weren't around Bella were all fucking great! There is a part earlier in the novel where Edward observes through his mind-reading powers that Ben and Angela each have crushes on one another but they don't really have the guts to ask the other person out, so in their Spanish class they have with Ben, Emmett asks Edward very loudly if he's asked Angela Weber out yet, and it gets Ben to finally ask Angela out and it's so fucking cute and the things it did to my heart made me think I was 12 again. There are also a lot of lovely flashbacks, including a scene about Edward's first Christmas with Carlisle that very nearly evoked a couple of tears from me.
This book was honestly the medicine I needed for the ailment that is 2020 as a year. It also made me ache in a certain way I wasn't expecting, but it was because I enjoyed this book and its nostalgia that I began to wish for something I haven't wished for so deeply since I was 14 years old: I wished Breaking Dawn was a different story.
Breaking Dawn is what dealt the heaviest blow to my enjoyment of the series, and my severe hatred of that book stems from many areas: the creepy half-vampire baby, the truly horrific pregnancy Bella goes through, the fact that it kind of sort of almost definitely condones pedophilia in a quiet yet still disturbing way, the utterly ridiculous conflict-non-conflict that is the final act of the book, and so much more. However, there is almost nothing I found more disappointing at the time than the fact that, several hundred pages spending time with these characters and their desires, Bella is turned into a vampire, and that never made sense to me, especially in Edward's story, where we are told time and time again that being a vampire in this world is basically torture for people like him and Rosalie, it never made sense to me that Bella ended up as a vampire. In all my months of theorizing how the series might end in the time between the releases ofEclipse and Breaking Dawn, I always expected for a cure for vampirism to be found and that would be how Edward and Bella would get their own small forever together. No awful pregnancy, no baby, no pedophilia, just a way for them both to get what they always wanted: to be together, have a life together.
This isn't a review of Breaking Dawn, but the reason I bring this up is I kept hoping for this book, Midnight Sun to pull a Life and Death. For the uninitiated, this means that, like the crazy gender bender, Life and Death, which, despite being nearly identical to Twilight as far as the general plot goes, has a different ending from its forefather to tie up the idea of rewriting the entire series in this new gender-bent universe, and I found myself wondering whether Stephenie might be moving toward a similar change. This book deals very much with Edward's humanity. It's more than twice as long as Twilight and much of it is added content like the Christmas with Carlisle scene I mentioned before, but much of that extra time is spent learning how Edward thinks of himself, how he wants to be, what he wishes were different, and his desire to live a human life and, moreover, to let Bella live a human life, is extremely powerful. It makes the fact that she's turned in Breaking Dawn even more disappointing. There was a part about halfway through this book where Edward listens to Alice's mind as she has a vision of Bella's future as a vampire, and I genuinely felt crestfallen by the idea, even though I have known her fate for over a decade now.
We get to see how Edward views Bella and, on top of that, we get to hear their conversations in much greater detail than before. It honestly was wonderful, finally getting to see what he sees in her, and I really do see it. Bella is actually really cute and funny in this book in all of the added content and I found myself appreciating her as a character in a way I had never done before.
I would be excited and interested to read the rest of the series from Edward's point of view, especially if Jake Abel, who translated beautifully from an actor on the screen to an actor on an audiobook, returned as the narrator. I would really like to see the events of New Moon in particular through his eyes. He is a genuinely fun and interesting protagonist and I would relish in just about anything else Stephenie might feel like adding to his story.
This was a really fun, melodramatic, and honestly really cute adventure. I'm truly delighted that Stephenie Meyer finally got to release it after not only the leak that happened in 2008, but also how, as soon as she decided to get back to this in 2015, E.L. James decided to release her own "first book told from the main guy's POV" book in Grey, delivering what I can only imagine to be a devastatingly demoralizing blow.
She finally wrote the thing and it's pretty fucking good. Good on ya, Steph. Good on ya.
kait_kosub's review against another edition
4.0
4.5⭐
This is better than Twilight! Being able to see Bella through Edward's eyes made her more likable to me. I loved being able to see Edwards inner struggle throughout the book and the love he has for Bella. I found it also added in new information we didn't get from the original. Loved it!
This is better than Twilight! Being able to see Bella through Edward's eyes made her more likable to me. I loved being able to see Edwards inner struggle throughout the book and the love he has for Bella. I found it also added in new information we didn't get from the original. Loved it!
randa907's review against another edition
Excruciatingly long, drawn out, pretentious, and angsty. I totally get it due to the context of the material and the history of the character but I just couldn’t get through it. Not for me.
isabellabaker's review against another edition
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
yosoyjuju's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
La vida no podría ser peor … hasta que lees la versión de Edward.
Es totalmente abrumador (y en parte ridículo) la manera de sentir de Edward, tan intensa, que tan sólo necesitó 905 páginas para narrar todo. Pero agradezco la insistencia de la autora por rellenar cualquier hueco que haya dejado en su primer libro.
Es totalmente abrumador (y en parte ridículo) la manera de sentir de Edward, tan intensa, que tan sólo necesitó 905 páginas para narrar todo. Pero agradezco la insistencia de la autora por rellenar cualquier hueco que haya dejado en su primer libro.