Stephenie Meyer

This book is Twilight, but with the genders swapped. And yes, it is as delightfully unhinged as it sounds.

Reading it makes you realise just how male-driven the original plot was—despite Bella being the protagonist, the original story mostly revolves around Bella reacting directly to Edward, random boys at school, and various men being Very Important. The characters’ personalities? Practically untouched. This results in unintentionally hilarious queer coding: muscle mommy vampires, show more swoon-worthy beautiful men, and the occasional scene that feels like it was written by someone who has never actually seen a man cry. Because, of course… boys do not cry. No.

The very few deliberate changes are equally funny. Where Bella’s tears would fall gracefully while she drives, Beau just… does not. Boys do not cry. The whole experience is chaotic, charming, and somehow even more absurdly enjoyable than the original. show less

While this is technically the canon ending to the Twilight saga, it reads like a bad fanfiction and I would recommend most readers pick a fanfiction they prefer.

There were some enjoyable moments - Charlie being furious about the wedding, being inside Jacob's head and seeing the wolf pack dynamics and learning more about Leah's character, the bad strongly outweighs the good. For those enjoyable moments, I can give a 2. But the book fails to me in every other way.

Bella gets pregnant on her show more honeymoon - which should not be possible, given that vampires are in a frozen state, and the explanation for why supernatural women are infertile but not men (Leah included) leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Bella's pregnancy nearly kills her, and when the baby is born - Jacob imprints on her. This has to be the most disgusting moment in the series, and I don't understand why Meyer thought the fans would like this. She claims Jacob is a character she loves. I wish she hated him if that was the case, to spare the fans his fate of losing his free will to vampires this way. It is also ridiculous to assert that Jacob's love for Bella was due to the egg. He fell in love with her before he ever became a werewolf.

Additionally, though I enjoyed Jacob as a narrator, it was a jarring difference to have him as narrator for so much of the book at once, instead of spread out every few chapters or something.

Bella then becomes a vampire, and is of course the most perfect vampire to ever exist, with zero challenges, which is quite boring, and nonsensical. Her shield power is fine, but the ease of it and her being "born to be a vampire" is ridiculous.

Vampire Bella was meant to have to fake her death and say goodbye to her parents - but Meyer decided to write an ending that allows her to stay in contact with Charlie. This once again takes all the angst and stakes and throws them out the window. There are no consequences to Bella's choice, everything just gets tied up in a bow with no main character deaths or anything. Even the wolves just kind of accept things.

The Volturi confrontation left one dead - but not a main character, only one we'd never met (only heard of), and many new vampires were introduced in the last half of the book, with no time for the reader to get to know them. Had they been introduced over time, readers may be more invested in them and their fates.

The ending is meant to be happy - Bella and Edward are together forever, and no one important died. But the build-up in the first three books would have necessitated a struggle with consequences - either losing everything to be with Edward, or choosing humanity and needing to take on the Volturi to protect her humanity.

Breaking Dawn is a disservice to the saga, and I would recommend reading the first three as a trilogy, and finding a good fanfiction or headcanon to wrap things up post Eclipse, because the canon can and should be disregarded. show less

Five stories of teens making the worst choices imaginable while demons, vampires, and cursed corsages gleefully murder their social lives—and honestly, I cannot stop laughing at how stupidly glorious this is.

I read the first Twilight book well after the franchise swelled to popularity because I'd become a teen services librarian, the series was still mega-popular as the movies were coming out, and I wanted to engage in conversations about the series. I was profoundly repelled, but could see what fans got out of it, no harm done.

With this gender-swapped version, I wondered if the series magic would suddenly take hold of me the way it did so many adult fans of the original books. Would Beau become show more my proxy as an initiate into the world of vampire love? Does an Ed by any other gender glitter as hypnotically?

Uh, no. The swap and rewritten passages were interesting to me for a few chapters -some of the changes improve the text!- but all too soon I lost interest and couldn't regard the plot as anything more than a jumbled collection of events that happened to use the same names. The "chased by gangsters" scene in particular seems inserted from another book entirely, and is even more egregious considering Bella was being chased by creepers in the original and this was deemed the "boy version" of that attack.

Also, the reveal of Edythe's age as "I've been 17 for a very long time" gave me pedo-shudders and, as in the original, demolished any romantic appeal from my mind and poisoned the book's attempts to make the couple interesting. Edythe's existence and purpose in the story, just like Edward's, is predicated on pretending to be a high schooler, macking on a teenager, then criticizing that teenager for being immature. That the book ends with them making out and promising to be together forever relegates this story to back-of-a-composition-notebook status.

But hey, Meyer wanted to experiment and give fans something for the 10th anniversary, and I have to respect that she churned out a whole new book's worth of bonus material. I just don't like it. And question why everyone is clamoring for "Midnight Sun" if this is how she writes an alternate POV of the story. show less