A
new twilight-y book from Stephenie Meyer, the author who changed the face of and opened the doors to young adult genre with her twilight series, is out.
This
is something that looked impossible. Steph had time and again said she doesn’t
want to visit the world she created anytime soon. But on the tenth anniversary
since the time the first twilight book came out, she decided to pull the cat
from the hat and announced a complete new [well, or maybe just modified]
version of twilight.
A
peek in the past...
Back
in 2008, the world went frenzy on social media and everywhere else when the
news of Meyer working on ‘Midnight Sun’ spread like wildfire. Midnight
Sun was supposed to be a full length twilight book narrated from the point
of view of Edward. Everybody wanted a piece of it.
But
we all know the fiasco. Twelve chapters from the unfinished book got leaked on
the internet and pissed Steph off so much that she decided to give up on the
book altogether.
So
now it wasn’t surprising that Steph maintained a hush-hush to such a far stretched
extent that not even insiders and prominent reviewers seemed to know about it.
No advance readers copies sent out, no elaborate title and cover reveal. Just
the final copies directly turning up on the book shelves worldwide.
For
the tenth anniversary...
All
those years later, Meyer’s publishers hoped she would give up on her grudge and
let Midnight Sun slip through her fingers for the grand anniversary. But
she was past it. Instead, she asked them if they would like to have something
else. Something a lot more fun.
So
when Meyer’s publishers insisted she write a new book in the series, give them some sort of a forward or finish the
unfinished book, she decided it was time to shun the haters who haven’t let her
live in peace.
Hatred
for Twilight...
The
most common hatred was targeted to Bella Swan who was ‘a damsel in distress,’
and ‘the worst heroine in the history of literature.’
People
also went on to show their contempt for Edward. ‘Wow, now a guy who is impossibly
beautiful and sparkles! A perfect female dream. Oh, wait...’
Meyer
argued, “Any one surrounded by super heroes is gonna be a 'human' in distress.”
Good
point. But what about her obsession with love? As if she has nothing else going
on in her life. Her life crashes down when her ‘guy’ leaves. Ridiculous!
“Twilight has always been a story about magic and frenzy and obsession of first love,’ she insisted. "So it would have made no difference if the humans were male and vampires were female." To prove her point, she put that theory to test in this new book.
Although
all her arguments made sense, they didn’t stop people from circulating GIFs and
creating hundreds of twilight parodies in the form of books, movies, short
films and anti-fanfic.
THE
NEW BOOK...
Frustrated
with all this, she decided to swap the genders to see if the story changed. Bella [the meek damsel in distress]was now a boy Beau. And the sparkling
guy with inhuman powers, Edward, was now Edythe, a girl. She also swapped
the genders of every other character in the book. [Except Charlie, Bella's dad,
and mom]
Minus
the minor changes that were inevitable when you narrate a story from the perspective
of a boy instead of a girl [For example, the narration, words and thoughts are "not nearly so flowery"], majority of the plot remained unchanged.
And for Steph, writing this new book was "not only fun, but very fast and easy."
So in a dual attempt of silencing the haters and giving her Twihard fans a gift on the tenth Twilight anniversary, Stephenie Meyer wrote Life and Death: Twilight Re-imagined. [The book released on 6th October, 2015]
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