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Midnight Sun is the long-awaited (by fans) story of Twilight from Edward’s point of view, giving readers the full, and I mean full, picture of what he was thinking during all the events of that book even while his teen love, Bella, was trying, and failing, to figure out what exactly was in his mind (and vice versa).
The story is the same but flipped. Edward meets a new girl at the school he’s been attending for a couple of years in Forks, Washington, known for its practically unrelenting rain. He’s been a vampire for a century; she’s just a girl who’s recently moved to the town from her home in Phoenix. He doesn’t think anything about this development, unlike most of the other kids in the school — until he meets her in person. He can read minds, and for some reason, hers is a complete blank to him. He can’t hear her thoughts. The other major issue is this: Her blood smells so good to him that he’s severely tempted to kill her and drink it, despite his decades of dedication to drinking only animal blood and keeping humans safe. He is horrified that the monster in him almost makes him kill her and more than a dozen other humans in the classroom where he encounters her.
But in a short time, he finds himself protective of this weak human girl who smells so good. And for some reason, he falls in love with her. Quite honestly, as much as I did admittedly gobble up this series for the juicy fantasy it is, I still can’t quite see why he does fall in love with her. The only reason he can give is that he finds her to be a good person. I think now if he had been able to read her mind like everyone else’s, he wouldn’t have been interested.
As much fun as I had falling into the fantasy a decade ago, now that I’ve not been immersed in it for a while, I’m just not into it. I did appreciate a few particular clarifications, and the last fifth or so, when a particularly dangerous vampire sets his tracking sights on Bella and she takes off for Arizona, has more action and tension than the rest of the book. It was most interesting to get a whole new story within that story of all Edward was doing while Bella was in Arizona with Jasper and Alice. Overall, however, I was ready to be done with the book. It just got tedious. Midnight Sun is 658 pages of inner monologue that explains a fair amount for diehards but is either, for me, a decade too late, or simply too much banal detail.
Rated: Mild, for occasional uses of mild profanity and for some violence and, of course, talk about drinking blood and actual drinking of blood, and brief but not-detailed references to murderers and sexual predators Edward killed in the past. The most violent part is near the end, when Bella is attacked by a tracker, who throws her into mirrors and breaks her leg, leading to a lot of blood loss. The characters kiss, and they talk about the possibility of being able to have sex sometime in the future. The content is very similar to the first Twilight, not surprisingly.
