Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer: Another Complete and Total Let-Down by a Lackluster Author (Ch. 26)

SPOILER ALERT: This book is absolute trash. I let my hopes get up and what a mistake that was. Absolutely disappointing.

Okay, can we talk about the fact that Meyer decided to start off chapter twenty-six with a sentence fragment? Has she been doing this all along and I hadn’t even noticed? Is this a thing now? If so, I’m absolutely shocked and one hundred percent horrified. 

I get that it’s a small thing. I get that she was probably trying to build suspense. But oh my it’s so annoying. There’s better ways to add drama to a scene than starting off with a sentence fragment. Maybe even put it in the middle! Don’t start off the chapter with one that doesn’t even add ANYTHING to the scene! It’s just one of those smaller things authors sometimes do that really bother me a lot for no apparent reason. I could probably write a whole list about my pet peeves for other people’s writing… and then go do all of them myself in a blog post.

What can I say? I’m a hypocrite.

But sadly enough that wasn’t the only thing that disappointed me during this chapter of Midnight Sun. The short-lived fight scene really blew me away. It was so completely and totally unimpressive. I felt let down by it all.

I mean, what was the point in all of that suspense leading up to saving Bella if Meyer wasn’t going to even write about the battle scene? Does she care so little about her readers that she’s willing to string them along chapter after chapter just to sputter out right at the end? Apparently so.  We spent more time chasing after James than fighting him. We spent chapters reading about Edward stalking Bella. We couldn’t spend more than half a page fighting the villain of the story. For crying out loud, Meyer wrote an entire passage on how much Edward admires Bella for turning her face up into the rain and how he admires her for not wearing makeup, but we can’t have a real climax to this book. She glazed right over the entire event and filled this chapter with unnecessary information about Bella. It was a huge let-down. It’s close to unforgivable in my opinion.

And more than anything else it made Midnight Sun feel like the total cash grab that it is. Stephanie Meyer doesn’t care about her readers. She’s made that abundantly clear with her numerous unnecessary releases related to the Twilight universe. Don’t even get me started on the Life and Death book. All she cares about is her bottom line. To me, it comes across as extremely disrespectful to her loyal fanbase to even release something so disappointing. Would she like to read a book that constantly lets her down? I don’t think so. 

And haven’t we all been through this before? She did the same thing with Breaking Dawn years ago and the fanbase exploded. Why all that build up for nothing? Did she really learn nothing from that experience? It’s so disheartening to read. She had the chance to partially make up for that horrible ending with a more descriptive battle here. Instead, it was just background info.

Of course, the only thing she went in depth with this chapter was Edward’s internal struggles on what to do to save Bella. It was interesting that Edward considered killing Bella before he considered trying to save her. He even began to rationalize it as the right thing to do: to give her one short life instead of life as a vampire. He tried to explain it as a better option, but I’m not so sure I agree. 

I also wonder why Edward’s eyes didn’t go read after drinking Bella’s blood. Do they only shift colors depending on how much blood a vampire drinks? He said that the edges of his irises were probably tinted red after drinking her blood, but at what point would they turn? 

And why would animal blood even make them gold in the first place? I had never really thought about how utterly ridiculous that was. Animal blood is almost always red. It is insane to think a different type of blood would have such a large impact on a vampire if they are fully capable of surviving off of both. If we are trying to blend a more scientific and modern view with vampires then we should at least have vampirism make sense.

All in all, these two things I found interesting this chapter weren’t enough to save this book from the absolute wreckage that just happened. Is it read-worth? No. Go read something by an author that actually cares about their readers.