Tag: Midnight Sun

August Reading Roundup

I was all set to post this on Friday, and then the news of RBG’s death broke, and I reached levels of despair about the state of the world I haven’t felt since March. It’s hard to believe that 2020 could get any worse, but on top of the plague, huge parts of the country are literally on fire right now, I don’t even know what hurricane is hitting where at this point, and I don’t even have words to express what RBG’s death and the upcoming battle for the Supreme Court means to me, so yes, 2020 did get worse. A lot worse. To my friends affected by the fires and the floods and the plague, my thoughts are with you. Please stay safe. And for anyone feeling hopeless, there are steps we can take beyond just wringing our hands and panicking. I never wanted this blog to be about politics, but I can’t ignore the fact that our very democracy is at stake. This is the time to call your senators, donate to campaigns, volunteer, and vote, vote, vote.

But this post isn’t really about politics. It’s about books. So let’s talk about books.

Nothing major happened for me in August. I continued to stay home and work from home and take Neutron for as many walks as I can. This past week marked my one-year anniversary working at the FCC, which is really cool. I definitely feel more confident in my work than I did on day 1, but it also doesn’t feel like it’s been a whole year, probably because half of that time I’ve been at home.

Collage of the covers of the books I read in August: Midnight Sun, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, Life and Death, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, A Constellation of Roses, Uprooted, Sticks and Stones, Artemis Fowl, Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, and The Mystwick School of Musicraft.I read eleven books this August. This felt like a minor miracle to me when I counted them all up, because in case you didn’t read my whole post on Midnight Sun, I got kind of hung up on Twilight again. Two of the books I read were in Braille, which gets me up to eight Braille books a month, which means I’m back on track to reach my goal of reading twelve books in Braille this year. There wasn’t quite as much variety in what I read last month as I’ve noticed in the past few months, but I still really enjoyed most of what I read. Three of the books I read were rereads, but the rest were new to me. I read one YA contemmporary; four middle grade fantasies, one of them a mystery, and two YA fantasies; three YA paranormals; and one fantasy that I’m honestly not sure what age category it belongs to. I also got two books on the day they came out in August and just blasted through them. I haven’t done that in a long time and it was really fun. For one of those books I also got to attend a virtual launch party, and I’ll talk about that experience in a bit.

My first book of August was A Constellation of Roses by Miranda Asebedo. Tricks has been on her own and on the run from the foster care system ever since her mom abandoned her. And she’s good at being on her own, because she can steal anything she wants, and she’s never caught. When the police finally do catch up with her, she’s given a choice, prison or going to live with her father’s family in the middle of nowhere. Tricks never met her father, never knew she had other family, but they welcome her with open arms. And it turns out she’s not the only one who do magic with her hands. All the women in her new family have special, powerful talents. As you must know by now, I’m a sucker for found family stories. Throw in a pie shop and a little magic, and I’m hooked. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend.

After that, I squeezed in the second Upside-Down Magic book, Sticks and Stones, by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. Strange things are happening at Nory’s new school, and everyone is blaming the Upside-down Magic kids. They’re even starting a petition to end the UDM program and kick the UDM kids out of school. Nory and her friends have to figure out who is trying to frame them, and working in a little kittenball wouldn’t go amiss either. This book was just as fun and delightful and full of heart as the last one. By this point I’ve read the third one too, and I can say this series is definitely going on the favorites list unless it goes, well, upside-down.

Then Midnight Sun came out and I was lost. As I’ve discussed at length over here, I loved Midnight Sun despite the many reasons I probably shouldn’t. And then, because Midnight Sun got me stuck back in the Twilight world again, I read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Twilight Reimagined: Life and Death, both also by Stephenie Meyer. I think I read Bree Tanner my first year of college, though I didn’t remember it until I reread it. And you know what, it was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Life and Death, though, was another matter. I was torn between hysterical laughter and utter horror as I read it. Far from demonstrating that the story would have worked if Bella was a boy, I actually feel like Life and Death made the mysogyny in the Twilight books that much worse. The two scenes in the original series that involve sexual violence against female characters are simply changed to muggings gone wrong, which is an excellent example of the idea that if the crime can be changed that easily, then it’s only a sexual crime because the victim is a woman and that’s not great. Never mind that Edythe (AKA female Edward, also I can’t get over the spelling of that name) frequently has less agency than Edward, and her inability to stay away from Beau comes across more as because she’s a girl, and I’m just going to stop here because this book made me really angry and I don’t even want to rant about it. Life and Death was an interesting experiment, I guess, but it didn’t work for me. But on the upside, it did the trick of getting me out of Twilight world for the moment.

After I read Midnight Sun, but before I read Bree Tanner and Life and Death, I spent a lot of time trying to find books that interested me enough that I wanted to read them instead of reading Twilight again. I ended up reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Did I pick it up because a friend described it as like Twilight for her? Yes, yes I did. But I didn’t find it to be very like Twilight for me. Every ten years, the lord of the valley, the immortal wizard called the Dragon, chooses a seventeen-year-old girl to be his servant for the next ten years. This is the price for the Dragon’s protection against the corrupted wood encroaching on the valley. Agniescka is seventeen this year, but she, like everyone else, is convinced the Dragon is going to choose her best friend, Kasia. Except, of course, he picks Agniescka. Because Agniescka has something the other village girls do not. She has the power to become a witch herself. The strongest aspects of this book for me was Agniescka discovering and grappling with the consequences of her new power and Agniescka and Kasia’s friendship. I didn’t really find all the political intrigue, epic war, and romance parts of the book all that interesting, and on the whole I felt like I was dragging myself through the book, which was unfortunate. It’s entirely possible I was still in recovery from Midnight Sun, but on the whole I’m sorry to say this isn’t a book I would recommend.

Next, I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. I’ve never read these books before, and after a lot of friends telling me they were good, and a desire to be able to join in on the discourse around the new movie, I got the first one out of the library and gave it a shot. Artemis Fowl is an evil genius. Also a millionaire. And a criminal mastermind. And did I mention genius. His father has disappeared and his mother is slowly going insane from the grief of losing his father. And Artemis has concocted a plan to get his hands on some fairy gold. Only he might have bitten off a bit more than he could chew when he kidnaps the fairy lieutenant Holly Short and soon finds his house under siege. This book started out slow for me, but it picked up really quickly and on the whole was fun and engaging. I have the second book out of the library now and I can’t wait to read it.

After that, I sped through Midnight At the Barclay Hotel by Fleur T. Bradley. This was a middle grade mystery/ghost story that reminded me a lot of And Then There Were None, the one and only Agatha Christie book I’ve ever read. A whole bunch of people are invited to the Barclay Hotel in the mountains of Colorado for a weekend getaway. Twelve-year-old ghost hunting JJ tags along with his mother, and bookish Penny comes with her grandfather. JJ and Penny befriend Emma, who’s lived at the hotel her whole life. They’re all set to have a fun weekend full of cupcakes and bowling and swimming pools and of course trying to find the ghosts rumored to haunt the Barclay Hotel. But then the butler announces that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Barclay, has been murdered, and all of the adults are suspects, so the kids set out to figure out who the killer is and to prove JJ’s mom didn’t do it. This was such a fun, fast mystery with all kinds of twists and turns. I loved the characters, and the twists were exactly right for the story. This was the second book of August that I snatched up the day it came out and just sped through. (Yes, the first was Midnight Sun.) I also went to the virtual launch party Fleur Bradley held, and it was so cool to hear her talk about how to write a mystery and where the ideas for the Barclay Hotel came from. On the whole, this was a great book and I would definitely recommend.

Then I got The Mystwick School of Musicraft by Jessica Khoury from Audible. It was free with their new Audible+ thing, and I’ve had it on my wishlist for a while, so I grabbed it, and oh I loved it so so much! Amelia Jones wants only to go to Mystwick and become a maestro, basically a super high-powered magical musician, and learn about her mother, who attended Mystwick herself and whom Amelia knows very little about. But then she fails her audition in a horrible way—like she gave the maestro a very, very impressive mustache kind of way. She thinks all hope is lost, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But then a mix-up leads to her getting a second chance. If, after two months at Mystwick, the maestros think she’s Mystwick material, she can stay. But not only is the work harder than anything she’s ever done in her life, someone is out to get her, and something dark and sinister is closing in on Mystwick. I feel like my description of this book doesn’t do it justice, but it is absolutely fabulous. Magical music stories are right up there with found family stories and space adventures for me, so I was probably bound to love this no matter what. But I adore all the characters, and I was hooked from start to finish. It was fast and fun and full of so many feelings. And the audiobook had actual musicians playing the songs the kids were playing in the background, which made it super epic. I don’t know if there are going to be any sequels to this but I would be so so happy if Mystwick was a series.

Finally, I finished the Harry Potter series with Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. My thoughts on the books themselves haven’t changed, but finishing the series this time felt especially bittersweet to me (mostly, bitter actually). I don’t know when I’ll pick them up again. I do plan to reread them in Italian before I go back to Italy, because I need to practice and I already own them in Italian and never finished them. But I don’t know when I’m going back to Italy. The plan was this October but with Covid of course that’s not happening, and it’s not happening any time soon. Also, as she-who-must-not-be-named continues to demonstrate her despicable transphobia, I just don’t feel right rereading the books again when there are so many other books out there that are just as good and whose authors aren’t horrible people. On the other hand, Harry Potter is such a huge part of who I am—it shaped me as a reader, a writer, and a person—and I’m not ready to just let the books go. So I don’t know, and adding all those mixed feelings to the Battle of Hogwarts was a lot.

And that’s it for August. Let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. And of course I will always happily take more recommendations for found family, magical music, and space adventure stories.

Midnight Sun Madness

Cover of Midnight Sun by Stephenie MeyerWell, friends, I promised it was coming, and here it is: all my thoughts on Midnight Sun, the good, the bad, and the confused. I have a lot of criticism for this book, but on the whole I really enjoyed it, and my primary reaction to this is that I want more Edwardian Twilight please give me more Edwardian Twilight!

Before we go on, I just want to flag that the real Quileute tribe is currently seeking donations to move to higher ground. I’ve learned since posting my last Twilight post that a lot of people didn’t think the Quileute tribe featured in the Twilight books is in fact a real tribe. They are a real Native American tribe, living right on the water’s edge in Washington, and they are attempting to move their at risk communities to higher ground to secure the survival of their tribe. If you’re a fan of the Twilight books, or have recently purchased Midnight Sun, please consider a donation.

For those who don’t know, Midnight Sun is Twilight told from Edward Cullen’s point of view. Stephenie Meyer started the project more than twelve years ago, while she was working on the original Twilight series. But in 2008, someone leaked her unedited, unfinished draft on the internet, and she set the project aside, much to everyone’s disappointment, because what we did see was so great. I found out recently (I didn’t know it at the time) that there were rumors she had picked up the project again and it was going to be published in 2015 with the tenth anniversary edition of Twilight, except then the Fifty Shades book from the guy’s point of view came out. I never got into those books and so know literally nothing about them except they exist and started as Twilight fanfiction, and I’m going to keep it that way because I’ve gone far enough down this rabbit hole. Anyway, when that came out apparently Stephenie Meyer set Midnight Sun aside, again, and we ended up with the gender-bent Twilight book, Life and Death, which I also just recently discovered and don’t really want to talk about (but I probably will, more on that later). Which brings us to 2020. It feels like everything in the world that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong, and everything is awful, but finally, finally, Midnight Sun has been published!

When I heard Midnight Sun was finally going to be published, I reread all the Twilight books in preparation. You can find my post about my feelings about the Twilight books over here.

There will be spoilers in this post. I’m assuming you’re familiar with the first Twilight book, at the very least. If not, read on at your own risk.

As I said, I really enjoyed Midnight Sun, against a lot of my better judgment. Because as we’ve already established, when it comes to Edward Cullen I’m apparently still sixteen and I don’t care how awful he is I love him so much.

Lots of people have gone through all the problems with this book. I don’t really want to tear it apart, because others have done a really good job doing that, but there are some things I just have to point out, in no particular order.

This book is still about the start of a toxic, abusive teenage relationship. There’s just no getting around that. Also, the way Edward thinks about female characters is pretty gross. Rosalie and Jessica come to mind in particular, but they are by no means the only ones in this book. Also, I don’t care what justification Edward has, it is still really bad that he is sneaking into Bella’s room to watch her sleep. He says he’s there to protect her and there’s nothing creepy about it, but he’s a vampire with super senses, and he can protect her from the front lawn or the roof or something, I don’t care. He’s in Bella’s room, while she’s sleeping, without her knowledge or consent, and that is creepy and wrong and not romantic at all. Also it’s made weirder by the fact that his whole family knows what he’s doing and is okay with it. Yikes! And finally, while it might have been okay to include Orson Scott Card on your list of favorite authors in 2005, when Twilight is set, that isn’t really an okay thing to say now in 2020, when the problematic issues of Card’s books and the fact that he is really homophobic have been common knowledge for a long long time. Disclaimer, I haven’t read Ender’s Game or any of his other fiction, and at this point I probably won’t,  so I don’t feel qualified to say more than that. But the fact is that Stephenie Meyer’s readers are living in 2020, and I never really got a strong sense of time in Twilight anyway. Like if someone hadn’t told me it was set in 2005 I wouldn’t have guessed that year, and it could just as easily have been set in 2020 without too many changes (like maybe there’s better internet in Forks in 2020, but there’s still a massive digital divide in this country so also maybe not). Anyway, my point is that including Orson Scott Card on Bella’s list of favorite authors felt too deliberate not to be a point Stephenie Meyer was making, and it made me uncomfortable.

Like I said, there are certainly many other problems with this book, but I’m really not here to rant about how problematic it is. Others have done that much more eloquently than I could. These are the problems that really jumped out at me, and I wouldn’t feel right not pointing them out up front. But Midnight Sun also did a lot of really cool things and brought a whole new perspective to Twilight for me, and what I really want to do in this post is talk about why.

One of the coolest things, as a writer, was being able to see how Stephenie Meyer has actually grown as a writer from the first Twilight to Midnight Sun. The writing isn’t bad in Twilight, in my opinion, but it certainly isn’t fabulous. Because Midnight Sun is essentially the same story, it’s really easy to see how Meyer’s writing has improved. I’m sure some would disagree with me, but I would actually say that Midnight Sun is quite well-written. Okay Edward says Bella has translucent skin a few too many times, and since a friend started referring to the monstrous part of Edward that wants to eat Bella as the eldritch horror living inside him, I can’t help cracking up every time Edward refers to the monster. But Meyer uses metaphors and symbolism and deliberate repetition in this book, along with other techniques she didn’t use in the first Twilight book, and she uses them well. She also captures Edward’s angsty teenage boy/hundred-year-old vampire voice really well.

Also, I have to give Meyer points for pulling off what had to be a really difficult point of view to write. She’s writing in first person, but it’s also kind of an omniscient style because Edward can hear everyone’s thoughts, with one notable exception, of course. Which makes Midnight Sun not only Twilight from Edward’s point of view, but almost Twilight from everyone’s point of view.

The new scenes that were added were pretty cool too, like the family conference after the car accident when Jasper and Rosalie are arguing for killing Bella because she saw too much, or how Jasper is actually using his powers at the baseball game to hide Bella. And the bit in the end where Alice is going through how she’s going to fake Bella’s accident, seeing how each decision will play out and making new decisions to make it go just right, is super awesome.

There were also some points in Midnight Sun where I felt like Meyer was actually taking this opportunity to respond to some of the criticism Twilight has faced without actually changing what happens in Twilight. This was a really intriguing idea to me. Obviously this might not be the case, but it’s how I interpreted it. The big ones that stood out to me in this regard were Edward’s justification for watching Bella sleep and Bella’s character. As I said earlier, Edward’s justification for watching Bella sleep still doesn’t make it okay in my opinion, but I accept that Meyer couldn’t just rewrite that part out of the book or significantly change it so that Edward asks Bella permission and she says yes. Still not okay though. As for Bella’s character, in Midnight Sun we get to hear Bella’s side of the Q&A chapter, which is glossed over in Twilight. Bella has things she likes and dislikes. She has plans for college and dreams of becoming an editor or a creative writing teacher. It makes sense that we don’t see this exact scene in Twilight, because we’re from Bella’s point of view and it would have been boring and very telly, but I do wish we had gotten these details from Bella’s point of view in other ways, because we have literally no inkling of any of this in Twilight, which of course is one of the criticisms of Twilight. So I’m glad we get the details in Midnight Sun, but it does feel kind of like Meyer is trying to say “look, Bella is a fully developed character,” while trying to retcon in all her hopes and dreams. As I said, I could be totally wrong on this, but it kind of does feel like Meyer is trying to respond to some of the critiques of Twilight, and even if it didn’t work as well as she may have hoped, I think it’s really brave of her to accept that she could have done better in the first Twilight and to try to show how she would have done it if she was writing it now. Again, just my interpretation.

Finally, I want to talk about the end of Midnight Sun and why I want more from Edward’s point of view. The ending was definitely the right ending for this book, but it wasn’t a good ending for Edward’s story. Spoilers ahead. Basically the book ends with Edward deciding, while Bella is in the hospital, that he is going to leave her. Not now, but some point soon. And as we know from New Moon, he does indeed leave. End of spoilers. So I know that everything works out, but I want to see the rest of the story from Edward’s point of view. At the very least, I want to see New Moon and Eclipse from Edward’s point of view. I really don’t care about seeing Breaking Dawn from Edward’s point of view honestly but I would read it if it were to be a thing.

I am aware that Stephenie Meyer has said she isn’t planning to write more of the Twilight books from Edward’s point of view. I’ve read various interviews where she’s said that writing Edward has made her anxious (and New Moon would be even worse) and that she didn’t enjoy not having the freedom she would have writing a completely new book. I appreciate both of these sentiments, but just in case Stephenie Meyer or anyone who has the power to change her mind is reading this, I just want to say that I kind of feel like I’ve been left hanging by the end of Midnight Sun, even though I have the rest of the Twilight books and I know it works out. And I would love, love, love more Edwardian Twilight. I know New Moon would be super depressing, but since Edward is apart from Bella, it would also basically be a completely new book. And I feel like Edward has the most character growth of the series in New Moon and Eclipse and I want to read that so much! So I will continue to hope.

I would also take any of the Twilight books from Alice’s point of view. Just saying.

In the meantime, since I’ve already reread all the Twilight books, the end of Midnight Sun left me listening to the last chunk of New Moon (from the point when Alice returns to the end) on a loop for days and days. I only managed to get out of the loop and start reading other books again by reading The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Life and Death, which I’ll talk about in my August reading roundup post soon. I also made a deal with myself that if I reach my goal of reading 100 books by December, I’m allowed to reread all the Twilight books again, reading Midnight Sun between Twilight and New Moon so things feel more resolved.

I could go on and on about Midnight Sun, but these are my main thoughts. As I said, on the whole I really enjoyed the book, despite its flaws, and I’m really really hoping for more from Edward’s point of view someday. If you’ve read Midnight Sun, I’d love to know what you thought of it.