Book Review: Twilight/Life and Death

Twilight Tenth Anniversary/Life and Death Dual EditionHi all! I was lucky enough to receive this beautiful new addition of Twilight and Life and Death (Twilight Reimagined).

First off, if you are looking for me to pan it, you can go ahead and stop reading. Seriously.

The reason why Twilight was such a huge sensation, for teens and adults alike (okay okay, mostly women) was because Twilight NAILED teenage angst. Upon re-reading the book ten years later, I found her character motivations dead on.

Look, I'm watching Twilight!

Look, I’m watching Twilight!

“But think about the children!” some of you will say. “What kind of role model are we setting are kids up with? Bella is not a feminist!”

You’d be wrong. Bella is her own person, and for her character, Edward is everything. Now let’s all think back to when we were teens. Some of you probably dreamt of traveling the world. Some of you wanted to be doctors, lawyers…and some of you were in love with love. I remember so many girls just dying to fall in love – everything else would fall into place later. Careers, if and when to have children, major life decisions all were later. NOW was all about finding the perfect person to spend the rest of your life with.

Now as for feminism, let us not forget that feminism, is at it’s heart, about choice. It’s perfectly fine for someone to go into the corporate world and kick butt, just like it’s okay for another woman to stay home and bake freakin’ chocolate chip cookies all day and wipe up drool. As long as she has the choice, we’re good. Right? You’re not putting your own beliefs and values on someone else, because that would be the antithesis of feminism. Right? Right.

Phew! Glad we got that out of the way. As someone who HAS done the corporate thing, traveling the country and world, etc., I can say it IS wonderful. We should all try it! If you want.

Anywho, back to the teen angst. It’s so perfect I felt myself melting back to highschool, when hubs and I were teenagers, and I was so crazy in love with him I literally couldn’t imagine a life without him. As an adult I now realize that’s crazy. But hey, it worked out for us in the long run 😉 But Bella is in that moment, falling head over heels in a very old-fashioned way with a vampire, and Meyer nails it so perfectly.

Life and Death is a twist on that, proving her point that the story is about a PERSON falling in love with a vampire, not a girl. Honestly, I thought the rewrite was fine. It didn’t zing with me as much as the first, and neither book is my favorite. I’m not usually a romance kind of girl, give me rough and tumble heroines or Hermione’s any day. But the rewrite is solid, actually more so than the first, and it has a cool new ending. I won’t say any more on that, but I liked it.

So if you’ve never read it, go ahead and get this beautiful deluxe edition. It may not be your favorite, but you’ll at least get a taste for what SOME (read: most) girls go through in highschool: Total, all-consuming and completely irrational love. As a mother I shudder to think of my girl giving herself over to a vampire, but hey. This is fiction. So let’s all breathe and remember we read fiction for fun. And you will have fun with this book, if you allow it.