Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined by Stephenie Meyer

Title: Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Series: The Twilight Saga
Previous Book in the Series:
1. Twilight
Date Started: January 23
Date Finished: January 24
Format: Hardcover from my shelf

The quickest summary of a book ever: Take the original and gender swap all the roles of this book and you’ve pretty much got Life and Death. I’ll admit when I first heard about this I was annoyed. For the tenth anniversary she released a gender bend version of Twilight instead of Midnight Sun which is what I really wanted to see? How lame. And as the reviews poured in for it, I was just skeptical to even try reading it. When I finally got around to it a few days ago, I was biting my lip through the first five chapters, because I was going out of my mind with boredom. It was almost like the same story, just with Beau instead of Bella, Edythe instead of Edward, McKayla instead of Mike – although I have to admit with this character the female version was more annoying than the male – and so on. I was half tempted to stop reading it and leave it abandoned.

But I soldiered on and you know what it actually got better and if anything I liked it better than the original. Don’t get me wrong this book still had its problems there were some scenes that the gender bend just didn’t work for – like the accident in the school parking lot, the final face off with the hunter – but otherwise I’m curious to know what it means that I found that Edythe was more forthcoming with information and Beau was less guarded about his thoughts than their original characters were. As for the ending, well, on one hand I liked it because it really worked with the way the characters were portrayed. But on the other hand, I think it was a little bit of a cop out by Meyer so that way she didn’t have to write three more books so we could see how those stories ended.

Final Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. I still think the reading was a little bit bland and honestly, those first few chapters bored me to tears. But other than that I actually liked this version of the story more than I did the original. I still would have preferred reading Edward’s POV in a completed Midnight Sun, but there’s always the fifteenth anniversary, right?

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