Friday, January 15, 2021

Rant Review: Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) by Stephenie Meyer

Title: Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5)
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Publish Date: August 3rd 2020

"When Edward Cullen and Bella Swan met in Twilight, an iconic love story was born. But until now, fans have heard only Bella's side of the story. At last, readers can experience Edward's version in the long-awaited companion novel, Midnight Sun.

This unforgettable tale as told through Edward's eyes takes on a new and decidedly dark twist. Meeting Bella is both the most unnerving and intriguing event he has experienced in all his years as a vampire. As we learn more fascinating details about Edward's past and the complexity of his inner thoughts, we understand why this is the defining struggle of his life. How can he justify following his heart if it means leading Bella into danger?"


This is going to be even more "stream of consciousness" than my reviews even normally are. You've been warned.

Who might enjoy this book:
-True fans of Twilight who still want more Twilight
-People who have been seeing the renewed interest in the series and want to either pick it up for the first time or are considering a reread for the first time (maybe skip Twilight completely and only read Midnight Sun)
-People who enjoy trashing a trashy book
-People who want to basically read a "You" style book where you are in the head of a dangerous bad guy and you watch him justify his dangerous actions and thoughts.

Things I enjoyed about this book:
-Some back story and interactions between characters
-It felt less isolated and suffocating than Twilight
-The Edward's mind-reading + Alice's visions made for interesting scenes
-The bits about Charlie's mind + Renee's mind = Bella's mind
-Morbid curiosity in how a dangerous predator justifies his actions to himself
-Can see how Edward became obsessed with "loving" Bella, and it feels less insta-love from his perspective
-The small moments of meta self-awareness where it seems like Meyer is basically saying "I've seen the critiques and they're wrong"

Dislikes:
-It's still Twilight
-Still problematic (for example: “Too… too perfect. I bet his dad experiments with plastic surgery on all of them. That’s why they’re all so white and pretty.” )
-It was so long
-Most of the increase in length is just internal monologues and endless angst and anxiety from Edward. I get what it was going for but I don't know how many times we have to see him rehash the same thoughts over and over.
-The gratuitous Persephone/Hades/pomegranate references. We get it, you regret the lack of child abduction and incest in the original saga.
-There's literally not a single mention of the Khaki skirt and I was really looking forward to seeing the meme from Edward's eyes



I'm going to mostly avoid talking about the problems that were in both Midnight Sun and Twilight. We all know how problematic the saga as a whole is, and if I may or may not write a full review of Twilight after my analytical read through. As a result, these are only my thoughts that are unique to Midnight Sun or my thoughts on the differences between Midnight Sun and Twilight.

I legitimately can't fathom reading this and seeing it as a romantic epic love story. But as a psychological thriller from the POV of the stalker/predator? It's not completely terrible. It was interesting to view this as the villain's POV and with the knowledge that he's unreliable and justifying terrible things. The grooming, the lack of agency and choice. The constant and casual gaslighting. The dark fated aspect where the whole family is taking bets on if she will be straight-up murdered by Edward, or if she will be semi-murdered and turned into one of them. Bella's wants and wishes and consent are never really a part of the equation. Just a powerful family meddling and making choices for a stranger's life without any knowledge on her part. Meyer seemed to feel that the darkness of Edward's POV would be from the constant fantasizing about murdering Bella and even later on the fixation on blood and the thin line he walks between wanting to be with her and wanting to eat her. But that's not the darkest or scariest part. The scariest parts of this novel are the little ways in which they show that human life means nothing to them and how they believe that they have the right to manipulate human lives as if they are the gods.

There is a degree of self-awareness sometimes here. Edward would occasionally call out how this thoughts are and actions are problematic, and then justifies them. Again, reading this from the viewpoint that the narrator is unreliable and is the antagonist of the story was crucial to me. I can't see his justifications and go "oh yes, he's right, I agree with him," but I can go "oh, I see, he really believes that makes it ok. What a twisted mind."

A pretty big improvement here was the context for why Edward even became obsessed with "fell in love with" Bella in the first place. In Twilight, Bella is bland and dull and judgmental. We never see her do anything she enjoys. She doesn't seem to have likes or hobbies. Most of the conversations we see between her and other people she is short and snide in her responses. And she is extremely judgmental. She has a constant internal commentary judging people on how they look, what they say, how they act, stereotypes she believes they fall into, and how they are just so inferior to her in one way or another (Bella is the queen of the "I'm not like other girls" trope “Normal human girls wouldn’t raise their faces to the drizzle that way; normal human girls usually wore makeup, even here in this wet place. Bella never wore makeup, nor should she.”) But in Midnight Sun, Edward's narration speaks of so much more from Bella than we ever see in her POV. He mentions her doing kind thing's like switching lockers with someone so they could be next to their friend, speaking kindly to teachers, sticking up for the "nerd" in their friend group when other's are teasing him for wanting to go to Comicon, asking the outcast to join her group in class when no one else would, etc.

We also get entire lengthy conversations between Edward and Bella that were just glossed over in her POV. And while they are overkill, in this instance it is important to the story because this is the first time in the saga that we see that Bella is maybe, almost, a sort of fleshed-out character. Granted, still not very fleshed-out, but there's something more to her. She apparently has likes and dislikes and has gone places and done things and has hobbies and held jobs and has hopes and dreams for the future. She was more than a vapid-shallow-hollow being that's only personality traits were fixating on the paleness of one's skin, lusting after the boy who made you feel genuine terror and then disappeared for a week, complaining about how miserable and green everything is and having a serious health problem that causes constant near-fatal accidents and is never addressed. Which, by the way, Charlise points out the worrying number of healed contusions in Bella's scan and then does nothing about it! They should have looked into the causes, first eliminating the idea that she's been abused her whole life, and then looking for a medical explanation. There should have been some serious concern here, especially after Edward says that she's extremely clumsy.

The other interesting choice was making everyone truly truly awful. In Twilight, Bella makes a lot of assumptions about people, and with no "proof" in the writing that her negative assumptions about their character are correct she just comes across as judgmental. In Midnight Sun, Edward can read their minds and we see that everyone is well and truly terrible. I like to think I have a fair and neutral assessment of my character, and I was still appalled by the thoughts of 95% of the people in the book. If this is really how Meyer thinks everyone else thinks, it really explains a lot. But, since canonically we see that all these characters really do think this way, I guess technically it means Bella's assumptions were all right and by comparison, she really is less awful. Not a high bar there though.

2/5 Stars
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