While he initially takes for granted his talent for reading people’s minds, the discovery that he cannot read Bella’s thoughts throws him off-balance. His constant cataloguing-of high-school minutiae, of every potential threat that could befall clumsy disaster-magnet Bella, of the hundreds of blushes that darken her skin-creates a high-strung narrative obsessed with not missing a single detail, lest it bring his carefully-crafted control crashing down around him. That said, it is genuinely a different perspective where Bella was so oblivious to her own allure in Twilight, Edward is hyper-aware of everything. When other vampires come sniffing around girl, our vampire must push her away to save her, but the real way to save her requires him to get closer to her than he ever thought he’d have the self-control to be. Vampire refuses to have sex or otherwise get too close to human girl, for fear of tearing her to shreds in his passion. Vampire fails, and forbidden love begins. Vampire seems repelled by girl, but it’s really a ruse to try to resist her overwhelming scent.
Midnight Sun sheds some sparkling sunlight on that interiority, though by dint of being a retelling, the facts remain the same: Century-old vampire meets seemingly unremarkable human girl in high school biology class. Part of Edward’s appeal in Twilight was his inscrutability, the fact that he played much of his motivations concerning Bella close to his unbreathing chest, except for when he felt the need to bellow that he was a monster and how could she love him, but he loved her too. Unfortunately, the answer is: only for the most diehard Twilight fans, and even then it’s a stretch. Over a decade after Bella Swan made her final choice, is it really worth resurrecting this book into a second life? With no real context for why the book is finally seeing the light of day, it’s difficult to see the rushed timing as anything more than a cash grab. Then, suddenly, this past May, it was announced that Midnight Sun would be published in just a few months.
James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (based on James’ Twilight fanfic) and its own reversed-perspective retelling, Grey. By the time she warmed again to the idea, over the intervening years, the project was again derailed by the emergence of E.L. At the time, Meyer announced that she would not be finishing the manuscript, as the first twelve chapters had leaked online and she felt like she had lost control of the story. Stephenie Meyer’s retelling of Twilight, her iconic YA novel of female desire, from the perspective of the smoldering vampire lover was first teased back in 2008, around the release of the final book, Breaking Dawn. Like Edward Cullen, Midnight Sun is older than it looks.
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