M = Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer

"Earthquakes couldn’t crush us, floods couldn’t drown us, fires were too slow to catch us. Sulfur and brimstone were irrelevant. We were the gods of our own alternate universe. Inside the mortal world but over it, never slaves to its laws, only our own."

Few books have incited as much Love and Hate as The Twilight Saga. All I'm going to say, is if you loathed Twilight through Breaking Dawn, you aren't going to like this book much better. It's Twilight, from Edward's POV; it isn't really any darker than Bella's POV, after all it is a vampire novel intended to be palatable for 13-year-old girls. It was never intended to be use as horror or erotica.

If you loved Twilight, just the way it was, this book is for you.

I feel like Stephenie Meyer has come a long way. She maintains the same level of teenage angst, self-flagellation, desperately sickeningly sweet love affair that we came to know in the first book, but her actual writing technique has improved with experience. Her sentences are fuller, the story a little more fluid... My only real critique is the overused and insanely repetitive metaphor of pomegranate seeds which super-unsubtly (is that a real word, my spell check says no?) make up the cover of the book.

So I enjoyed this book; parts of it made me giggle like the teenage girl it was intended for. What can I say, there's nothing like the innocence of first love, especially between an emotionally stunted vampire who's not happy about having fallen in love and the uber-naive girl who wouldn't have it any other way. It reads fundamentally Edward, his loathing for himself, his obsession for Bella, even though I know what's going to happen, and most of the whys, I was super excited to relive the sparkly vampire cheese-fest. This was a really fun book. Some of Edward's flashbacks in the first half were superfluous--They needed to be flushed out like real stories or deleted altogether because I found they added very little the way they were... I knew what SM had wanted to do, I just wasn't sure she'd done it.

I liked getting a look at Edward's family from the mind-reader's POV. I always loved Jasper, but his cunning was maybe developed a bit more here. And Emmett portrayed as the goofball of the family in Bellas POV, got himself an upgrade as the family's protector. Goddamn bitter Rosalie, pretty face on a poison personality... Oh, the feels.

I have to say, the best part of this book may have been the end. I don't mean that facetiously. But the hunt was way cooler from Edwards POV, and then that part got upped by his high-speed car chase to get to Bella in a cityscape that was effectively a vampire's worst nightmare. I felt like I was in the car. Then there was Alice using her visions to plan and execute a cover up...

And towards the end, the hint of heartbreak on the horizon. Because Edward is determined to live in a world without happy endings, he hints at the events of New Moon. He knows even as he's saving her, even as he's promising never to leave her, that it's time to plan an exit strategy from the relationship he doesn't believe he deserves. That pisses me off because I want my HEA and clearly, I'm not getting it here, and we've not been promised the other 3 books from his POV.

Let's be honest about The Twilight Saga. It wasn't the most well written, it didn't have the most developed characters. It's not the vampire story we wanted; but for thousands of people it became the vampire story we never knew we needed. There's something addictingly perverse about the lack of perversion.