Not worth burning the midnight oil

This is an unconvincing and ultimately frustrating romance.

I’ve exercised a lot of self-discipline to get through the entirety of Midnight Sun. It’s Twilight
(Twilight Saga #1), but told from Edward Cullen’s point of view, which I suppose I thought would shed a lot more light on his (terrible and rude) behaviour in the first part, but the book is focussed mostly on his self-loathing angst and is a somewhat unconvincing romance.

This book is much longer than Twilight, but it still doesn’t manage to give the reader more information than the latter managed to. Full of Edward’s rambling, incessant, inner monologue, it serves as a recap for the story narrated in Twilight, but done through Edward eavesdropping on Bella’s friends to keep track of her activities in school and somehow convincing himself to follow her around stealthily after school (read as stalking).

They get together, but without a convincing explanation as to why either of them are so attached to the other.

Vague and blurry

The pacing is extremely questionable, with plenty of info-dumps that reveal large parts of Edward’s life post his transformation, most of which we learn about in the rest of the Twilight saga combined, but I found myself getting confused in some places where things move at a blurry pace. I couldn’t really get myself to care about most of those anecdotes, but found myself growing increasingly disappointed with the fact that the author’s writing style hasn’t evolved 11 years after the last Twilight Saga book was released.

This still seems to be a story driven by a vague idea present in the author’s head, though writing this story from a different point of view seems to provide the opportunity to fix so many of the criticisms made over the last decade; the characters though, still come across as impossibly shallow. I found myself unable to sympathise with any them, because nobody in this book seems to behave like they possess an average amount of common sense.

Another issue that impacted my enjoyment of Edward’s perspective is that almost all the characters are made to look like they think in completely formed, coherent sentences.

I found myself eager to skip through many incidents I am already familiar with, because there was just no way that teenagers in school would think what Edward claims they were thinking.

The relationship between Bella and Edward is still made to look shallow and superficial, peppered with cheesy lines that might even make the least cynical reader roll his/her eyes. All Edward thinks about is how perfect she is, how he doesn’t deserve her and all Bella thinks is the same about him. To be fair, he does make many observations about her positive traits, but it’s still a bit far-fetched to imagine any teen who is as well-rounded as he perceives her to be. She wants to be close to him and has no sense of self-preservation, which I find incredibly hard to understand.

Though he confesses to eavesdropping and stalking her, the rate at which their relationship and attachment to each other progresses is alarming. Edward’s controlling behaviour being accepted by Bella, though she is described as an unusually perceptive individual, is the most frustrating part of their alleged romance.

On a positive note, the book is amazingly consistent with the events that occur in the book that narrates the same story from Bella’s point of view, but I’m more inclined to hold the editor responsible for that. Nothing about this book is the romance it promises to be.