Title: Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined
and also Twilight Special Tenth Anniversary edition
Series: Twilight saga #5
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers
Date Published: October 6, 2015
Pages: 752 (hardback)
Summary
Celebrate the tenth anniversary of Twilight! This special double-feature book includes the classic novel, Twilight, and a bold and surprising reimagining, Life and Death, by Stephenie Meyer.
Packaged as an oversize, jacketed hardcover “flip book,” this edition features nearly 400 pages of new content as well as exquisite new back cover art. Readers will relish experiencing the deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful love story of Bella and Edward through fresh eyes.
Review
I bought this book for 2 reasons. The first is because I wanted to feel the same things I felt while reading Twilight for the first time. The second was because it was a gender-swap and I thought it would be hilarious.
What ended up happening was that since this book has 2 novels wrapped into one, I ended up reading both Twilight and Life and Death at the same time to compare. I got more emotion out of re-reading Twilight for the possibly-fourth time than I got out of reading Life and Death.
Now, I was completely wrapped up in Twilight when I first read it, up until the movie for Breaking Dawn Part 1. I was pretty done at that point. Twilight was out of my system because I had read dozens of better YA books since then. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy Twilight for many reasons--and I might name them at the end of this review--but there are many problems with it.
Life and Death just left me disappointed. The book started out exactly the same up until about chapter 8 or 9. I got bored because of the short sentences, Beau's ridiculous thought-process and because I was basically re-reading a dumber Twilight. I know, I said it was exactly the same as Twilight as it started out and it was, but with very short sentences. It was too choppy and boring.
In the beginning, Beau's thoughts were too much like Bella's, but as the book progressed, they started to progress and differ from Bella's.
I was also having slight difficulty in puzzling together who all the characters originally were in Twilight--because there were too many names that started with "E"--but it became less confusing throughout the novel.
I found this book just as, if not more sexist than the original Twilight. I can understand why Stephenie Meyer felt the need to change some things, but she could have left others alone! Boy or girl, some of the original plot could have stayed! But I suppose Meyer thought we all didn't want to get bored and complain about how it wasn't any different from Twilight.
I feel like Stephenie took this book much too seriously when she should have written it as a joke kind of thing. Instead, she decided to shove this down our throats.
Now here are some spoilery/fun things:
When Edythe and Beau were about to leave the meadow: when Edythe wanted Beau to ride piggyback on her but he refused because she was tiny, I was laughing because it was ridiculous how she sped off to yank a boulder out of the ground to bring it back to Beau. I thought it was a funny, girl-power moment!
I noticed something while I was reading. When Beau took the phone and Joss started talking to her, how could not hear her? Joss was telling Beau to follow her instructions while Archie was standing in the same room, and vampires are, evidently, supposed to have super hearing so how does this make sense? Same thing with the original Twilight. How could Alice not have heard it too??
There were several other plot holes but this was the one that hit me the most.
My favorite line in probably the whole book was when Joss and Beau were at the ballet studio. Joss was explaining how she'd manipulated him while Beau was wondering why she was bragging about outsmarting a "weak human." And then I busted out laughing at the next line: "Where was the glory in beating some weak human? I didn't feel the need to rub it in to every cheeseburger I conquered."
I liked how Stephenie Meyer did this big "what if Bella had left 5 minutes sooner" ordeal. It was very interesting in the beginning, then the ending became more scrambled than scrambled eggs. It was like all the Twilight books were wrapped up into one and it was just too much. Some of the information didn't even need to be there. If I was someone who hadn't read the original Twilight saga before this Twilight Reimagined, I would have been confused by all the new, overbearing information that was almost randomly thrown in there.
I would have been much happier if Stephenie Meyer had released Midnight Sun. And she had enough time to finish writing it; I don't care what she claims. She knew that the 10th anniversary of Twilight's release was coming up, and if she had enough time to think about and write Life and Death, she had enough time to finish Midnight Sun. I'm sure we all would have been happier. I'm not sure how much happier, but I'm sure it would have been better than what she ended up releasing.
Reasons why Twilight will always be kinda special to me: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight opened the door for YA fiction. The young adult genre is the most popular book genre now because Twilight blew up.
And Twilight was the first book I read and liked, and it encouraged me to read more. If it weren't for this book, I don't know if I would have gotten into reading, which would have led to me never trying out writing and falling in love with it.
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