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julie_c 's review for:
Twilight / Life and Death
by Stephenie Meyer
So Stephenie Meyer's entire premise for this book was that she could switch the genders of all the characters of Twilight and everything would work just as well. But, honey, it didn't.
I was an avid Twilight fan in my day and though I have grown since then and I have been able to see some of the saga's flaws, I still like it even if somewhat secretly. So when I saw this new book, I was in a book rut and I thought, it won't hurt. And it didn't, but it sure as heck wasn't good.
The problem began with the new narrator, Beau. My biggest problem with him is that he doesn't sound convincingly like a guy. Except for a line here or there that is more stereotypically male (well, awkward definitely not hyper-masculine male), Stephanie shows that she could not write from a guy's perspective for the life of her. Especially after having internalized the original Twilight book from a female perspective, I often forgot that Beau wasn't Bella. This was the same for all the other characters too. The problem with changing something that people have loved for a long time is that you get fixed ideas of how the characters should be, and that completely got in the way of actually accepting the new characters on their own. There wasn't even much of an effort to make them into solid characters like the ones in the original book, and it totally took me out of the story.
So basically, Stephenie failed to prove that a gender swap would work just as well. Sorry, Steph, you tried.
But actually she didn't.
A lot of the book was word for word copied from Twilight (I know because I used the search function on Kindle to prove it). This was a big mistake because already the original story was getting in the way of me accepting the new one, but this made it even harder to believe. Furthermore, in being already somewhat removed from the story, I was able to see flaws from the original Twilight book that I maybe wouldn't have been reminded of otherwise, like how Bella is in love with Edward to an actually insane degree. It's more acceptable and believable in Twilight, but in Life and Death it came off as insane.
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
The new ending also really bothered me. My first issue was that it was basically an info dump of a lot information that unfolded more naturally over the course of the original saga and it was quite frankly very boring. Also, it was unbelievable that during the extremely painful transformation Beau would be able to pay attention and internalize so much of it. And just when it seemed like everything was over, Stephenie kept going. Having Beau go to his own funeral was just plain cruel and unnecessary and things dragged on even longer after that and I was just thinking, when will this end already??? All of the subtleties of keeping a Bella human and having her have to wait for the transformation, and go through so much more, until book 4 were completely gone and what was left was a big 'ol mess.
All in all this was not a very good book. I don't regret reading it, because it did remind me of the good old days when I was super into Twilight, but it definitely was not done right. Twilight was better by far.
I was an avid Twilight fan in my day and though I have grown since then and I have been able to see some of the saga's flaws, I still like it even if somewhat secretly. So when I saw this new book, I was in a book rut and I thought, it won't hurt. And it didn't, but it sure as heck wasn't good.
The problem began with the new narrator, Beau. My biggest problem with him is that he doesn't sound convincingly like a guy. Except for a line here or there that is more stereotypically male (well, awkward definitely not hyper-masculine male), Stephanie shows that she could not write from a guy's perspective for the life of her. Especially after having internalized the original Twilight book from a female perspective, I often forgot that Beau wasn't Bella. This was the same for all the other characters too. The problem with changing something that people have loved for a long time is that you get fixed ideas of how the characters should be, and that completely got in the way of actually accepting the new characters on their own. There wasn't even much of an effort to make them into solid characters like the ones in the original book, and it totally took me out of the story.
So basically, Stephenie failed to prove that a gender swap would work just as well. Sorry, Steph, you tried.
But actually she didn't.
A lot of the book was word for word copied from Twilight (I know because I used the search function on Kindle to prove it). This was a big mistake because already the original story was getting in the way of me accepting the new one, but this made it even harder to believe. Furthermore, in being already somewhat removed from the story, I was able to see flaws from the original Twilight book that I maybe wouldn't have been reminded of otherwise, like how Bella is in love with Edward to an actually insane degree. It's more acceptable and believable in Twilight, but in Life and Death it came off as insane.
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
The new ending also really bothered me. My first issue was that it was basically an info dump of a lot information that unfolded more naturally over the course of the original saga and it was quite frankly very boring. Also, it was unbelievable that during the extremely painful transformation Beau would be able to pay attention and internalize so much of it. And just when it seemed like everything was over, Stephenie kept going. Having Beau go to his own funeral was just plain cruel and unnecessary and things dragged on even longer after that and I was just thinking, when will this end already??? All of the subtleties of keeping a Bella human and having her have to wait for the transformation, and go through so much more, until book 4 were completely gone and what was left was a big 'ol mess.
All in all this was not a very good book. I don't regret reading it, because it did remind me of the good old days when I was super into Twilight, but it definitely was not done right. Twilight was better by far.