The only way I could be positive she was safe was if there was someone in place to catch the meteorite before it could touch her.” “What if I went to school tomorrow.and her seat was empty?” he thinks. He turns into a tight ball of panic at the thought of a meteorite hitting Bella in the night. This reads as Meyer attempting to combat earlier criticism of Edward’s creepy tendencies, but in reality it just feels exhausting. He hates himself for this, too, calling himself “no better” than a Peeping Tom. But he also wants to save her! In fact, he is so concerned about her ludicrous clumsiness and magnetism for trouble that he justifies following her around, listening to her conversations, and watching her sleep. Blood “colors her skin” once every two or three pages, and, oh, he wants to kill her so badly. We are given paragraph after paragraph of Edward hating himself for his own desires. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play But so kind as to be “something halfway between a goddess and a naiad”? Meyer never really proves it.

Exhausted by the sounds of petty teenage thoughts all day, Edward is swept away by Bella’s kindness, though the only impressively kind things she does are A) treat her friends as human beings and B) show a somewhat alarming lack of self-preservation. She is the epitome of the “not like other girls” trope. All others, humans and vampires alike, pale in comparison to her grace and selflessness.

He’s the poster child for love at first sight, never giving a compelling reason for why he’s so taken with Bella other than her incomprehensible goodness. Instead, he spends the whole book-all 672 pages-agonizing over, first, his hatred for Bella and her intoxicating scent, and then, almost immediately after, his love for her and her humanity. We get little insight into the fantastic world he lives in. The only new element is Edward’s thoughts, and sadly, they’re not particularly fascinating. It’s a “companion” to the original Twilight, a retelling from Edward’s perspective rather than that of his lover, Isabella Swan. The book is not, in one sense, a new book. Her writing has improved substantially since Twilight was released in 2005, but her narrator-the sparkling-skinned vampire Edward-seems as world-weary as Meyer herself. She calls this book her “nemesis,” says “every single word was a struggle.” And it shows. Meyer has been sweating through this book for years, reworking it since a first draft leaked back in 2008, much to her chagrin. He is both the only selling point and the greatest flaw of Midnight Sun, the newest book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, which until very recently had ended more than a decade ago. For someone who can read others’ thoughts, Edward Cullen sure spends a lot of time ruminating on his own.

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