MIDNIGHT SUN IS STEPHENIE MEYER'S NEW (by definition) offer to readers who have been captivated by the bite of the romance that sprawled between a fragile high school girl and a one-hundred-something-year-old vampire. It was an unlikely match but one that has surely kept readers biting the book for more romance, fantasy, danger, folklore, and even history.
The year was 2008 and I remember how the world seemed to have been engulfed by energy unmet since the release of the first Harry Potter book in 1997. Suddenly, the overcast, which was uncharacteristically weird around that time of the year, didn’t seem unwelcome; rather it brought with it the smell of mossy green and the bite of romantic danger.
Isabella Swan, or just Bella, finds herself at a crossroads following a decision to move to the wettest and gloomiest place in the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State. She had never been to Forks since she was a young girl at a mere young age. Her mom remarried an unknown baseball player who always has to be on the move, thus, the decision to move from Phoenix and stay with her dad, Charlie, whom she barely had any deep connection aside from just that…being her father.
There, in a place that seemed to had been doomed to perpetual gloom, she met her bite of interest, Edward Cullen. Edward, seventeen (for a while now), had his set of secrets to keep. Secrets, for many fans and plain readers alike, both kept and shared. One thing we all know since 2005 was Edward is a vampire.
In Midnight Sun, readers have been introduced the plethora of dilemmas Edward confronted since First Sight–the one day he wished he could fall asleep rather than finding the need to face Bella and plan how he intended to drain the blood out of her fragile little body.
The book offers a fresh point of view of the story that has kept us believing vampires do exist. Edward thoughts were a torrent of searing venom that is slowly making its course throughout our minds and imagination, giving us a new way of looking into the romance between the unlikely pair.
However, I find the book painfully and horribly slow in pacing unlike the main Twilight saga books themselves. It seemed Meyer did spend a considerable amount of time exploring every possible corner of Edward’s mind, which, by the way, is a Pandora’s box of stories, secrets, and memories sprawling from decades past. And here lies the stark mistake Meyer did (at least for me).
I find the exploration both a slow burn and a dilemma. For one, regardless of where Edward’s POV leads the readers, it will boil down to what we already know from reading Twilight. Meyer’s job as the author was to explore the stories behind Edward’s mind to differentiate the storytelling from Twilight, and with that, she did a good part. The dilemma was, on the readers’ part (again at least for me), was deciding whether all the stories in Edward’s mind do give weight to the story holistically or not. There were musings on Bella’s feelings across the book that, for me, completely unnecessarily long as it also led to some musings that were unrelated to the initial ones. How can one have such deep and long considerations for one’s feelings anyway?
In the end, I decided to stop at page 420, right where Edward invited Bella to meet his, for all sorts and intents as pretend-humans, family. I just found the storytelling too draggy and predictable for the most part. Edward can really be that pensive. We all know what happened in the end anyway--they danced under a patio filled with bright lights at prom.
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