— • 3.5 • —

So we finally made it. I’m going to have to go for a rating of 3.5 even though it makes me feel kinda bad to rate such a large book so low... But it left me with so many mixed emotions and unfortunately by the end I was basically counting down the minutes.

Let’s get started by saying that I listened to this on Audible and I absolutely did not realise what I was getting myself into. I saw 26 hours and thought ‘oh I could finish that in a week, it’s like the length of a decent sized video game, easy.’... I was terribly wrong. This book was way too long for its own good and I can’t imagine how I would have coped reading a physical copy. Perhaps I should have taken a couple weeks break midway though because listening to it every night back to back was quite overwhelming. The only thing that kept me going was the audible performance by Jake Abel, and it’s fair to call it a performance because I thought he narrated it brilliantly and played Edward perfectly. To me he was Edward and you could feel all of the emotions in his voice from his desire and heartache to moments of panic and rage. His changes in pacing elevated climactic moments and made you feel part of that character. I thought he also did a great job performing the other characters too and even made Bella slightly less annoying than I thought she would be.

Anyway let’s get back to the book aye! The first few chapters I quite enjoyed simply because I was experiencing the story from this new perspective. Of course a vampires perspective would be way cooler than some teenage girls and if you can get past the slight creepiness of it all and confirm that yes this what I’m reading rn, it isn’t entirelyyy terrible. It’s interesting to see how Edward came to terms with his feelings and struggled to control his urge to kill Bella; I found it disturbingly funny when he contemplated killing everyone in the classroom in different violent ways in front of her eyes before then killing her. Psycho! But he fights through these moments and their relationship gradually develops; these were probably the best parts of the book so I won’t say much more there.

However there are moments when there is simply too much information. Since we’re inside Edwards head we get to hear every single thought he could possibly have (plus the thoughts of others) and it often felt like it was never ending. Constant over the top descriptions or spending an age going back and forth with thoughts. It made me feel like the author was just writing whatever came to her head and leaving it on the page no matter what. There was nowhere near this much detail in the original book and that’s what made it feel like an actual story rather than this endless diary of thoughts. I get you want to add as much stuff as possible for the fans but there’s a reason we keep most of our thoughts to ourselves because some are stupid and nobody needs to know about them! It’s lucky that Vampires don’t need to shit because I guarantee his constipation would have been closely described for us. I mean jeez there was a 1 hour and 40 minute long chapter of them sitting in a field!

So you thought that was bad enough? Sadly we haven’t even got to the worst part of it. So here we go, drum roll... it’s Alice. I know right, you’re probably thinking ‘Alice? But she’s lovely!’ And you’d be absolutely right, but I put my big brains hat on for this. It’s actually the combination of Edwards mind reading mixed with her ability to see possible futures that sends this book right down the drain because we keep getting it stuffed down our throats. The whole second half was littered with visions of potential futures and a constant ‘what is Alice seeing? oh so we can’t do that, what if we do this? what it she seeing now?...’ ‘Alice is seeing this! Alice is seeing that!’ By the climactic part of the book with the tracker vampire I found myself zoning out because I got so bored trying to follow what might or might not even happen.

Oh and on the subject of the climactic end, just when we find out the tracker has found Bella and will probably kill her at any moment, we get a whole chapter of them looking for a car to steal and going for a drive, ‘oh let’s steal another car because it’s a Porche-whatever the fuck it’s called and can go 10mph faster woah, but oh no Alice said don’t go too fast because her visions changed oof, aye guys look out the back window for me so I can use your minds as rear view mirrors while also using Alice’s visions to dodge through traffic, fantastic! Wait lemme remind you how fast I’m going for the 5th time aha! Oh now we’re at the airport let’s get a damn plane!! Is she dead yet? Who cares! Just don’t run quickly though security otherwise you’ll look suspicious...’ I think the author genuinely realised ‘oh shit I have nothing actually exciting to end this book with from Edwards perspective so let’s have a stupid car sequence and then oof after the day is saved instead of ending the book let’s have a whole chapter of Edward watching a video of Bella being beaten up yay exciting!’

Honestly this story is very basic without Bella’s & Jacobs side and the whole love triangle. Thankfully the Epilogue redeems itself a bit because we finally get back to Edward and Bella’s awkward cuteness as they go to the prom, plus a visit from Jacob during the dance, and that’s kind of all we wanted all along.