Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer: A review

A review of Midnight Sun can’t exist without some... understanding of the author’s experience with Twilight. Someone who hated Twilight will have a completely different experience to someone who loved it.

When Twilight was at its most popular, I was 14 years old - the exact target age for the series, something people like to forget when analysing it as a genuine piece of high art.

I loved it. I had all the merchandise and the New Moon film happened to come out on my birthday and my birthday party was taking my friends to see it.

I even read Midnight Sun when a few chapters were released on Stephenie Meyer’s website. It was everything I wanted from the series and gave me more information about the character that was essentially my first crush (sad, I know).

Now I’m a professional editor (which I realise is putting my writing up to scrutiny) and I happen to live with my best friend who was also Twilight obsessed. When the book was announced, we laughed and joked about how we’d waited our whole life to read Midnight Sun because, at the time, we thought it was better than the original Twilight because Bella was a boring main character. We immediately preordered Midnight Sun with plans to read it together and I’m the only one of us to finish.

Upon reading Midnight Sun, we realised something; Bella wasn’t the boring one in Twilight - it was Edward.

Bella was a human character who hadn’t experienced much at 17 which, whilst completely normal to us now, seemed kind of pathetic to two 14 year olds who thought 17 was extremely old and cool. Edward, on the other hand, had lived for around 100 years and still hadn’t seemed to achieve much. Sure, he could play the piano and he got straight A’s, but people achieve that without unlimited time and they do it with more charm and charisma than Edward could ever manage.

I was shocked because my post-fan feelings tended to be “The series is okay, but Bella made it worse” and I feel like I was manipulated by the discourse that painted Bella as the worst role model of all time but didn’t criticise Edward beyond “Sparkly vampire = embarrassing”.

Midnight Sun highlights the worst parts of Edward’s character, showing just how much he kept from Bella which could’ve easily persuaded her to stay away from him.

“Hey, Bella? My family held a meeting where we voted about whether to kill you!”

“Hey, Bella? I actually don’t care about human life but I’m obsessed with you so I know I should probably be nicer!”

The book serves to make the Cullens way less sympathetic, which is the only way that vegetarian vampires is going to work - you have to admire their restraint. However, it turns out that whenever someone smells particularly delicious, they encourage each other to give in and eat them.

Most of all, Midnight Sun is boring. It tries to address the criticisms of the original work by making Edward seem concerned as an excuse for watching Bells sleep, and tries to convince us that Bella is an independent young woman who fell in love.

Hearing other character’s thoughts wasn’t as interesting as it seemed it would be because all of Bella’s classmates just complain about Bella all day and the Cullens just talk to Edward inside their head in scenes they could just as easily have been conversations.

Instead of trying to address past criticisms, Midnight Sun should’ve focused on being entertaining because say what you want about Twilight, but it was at least entertaining.