I am so confused, this had so little resemblance to the first book's characters. I'm going to rant. I am so disappointed I pushed this series onto all my friends.

What Didn't work for me- The first half of the book.

The first chapter set the story was a bitter pill for me. It was a horrible misrepresentation of these characters that I grew to love in book 1. It was hard to feel the love they had developed over a great time.  How can I witness such nastiness/abuse and just accept it was okay ? What happened to her backbone, his respect ? I had thought there had to be a curse on them, changing them so completely.  No. The scene made no sense, it did not develop the story in any way it was just thrown there.

Sex, I like sex, I like my characters to have fun sex. These strong characters were demoted to emotionally immature rabid rutting rabbits. They couldn't just hold hands, hug or make eye contact without rut rut rutting. Was the rutting sexy ? Maybe a couple of times but most was just "BADDA BADDA BING, oh me so horny, need you right now" no matter where or what was happening. It wasn't connecting, it distanced them from my care center. I started dreading hearing how her core was hot, wet, clenching....OH my gods aren't you sore yet ?

What happened ? I picked the first book as my #1 new author read of the year. There was a perfect balance it flowed. The book felt like it was written but somebody felt the need to throw sex in here there everywhere to make it sell ? Again- They didn't or feel natural to the story. I could have not read the first half and not missed much.

What worked- The last 1/4 of the book was action filled with the characters I grew to love. They had a job to do and they worked at it, bleed for it.  The second half had some adventure, discoveries and godly gods of old. The side characters started to come back as the snarky fellows I grew to love. The ending was expected but it worked.

I'm giving it 3 stars for the second half of the story. Will I go on to book 3 ? I think so, it's not a sure thing right now. 

Stephenie Meyer to agent--"I want to prove all of those haters wrong who say that Edward was kind of creepy and stalkerish and Bella was a bit of a pushover with no real personality other than her obsessive love for Edward.  How to do it, oh I know, I'm going to switch all of the genders of the characters.  We all know that women can't be super possessive and kind of serial killery and men can't be solely defined by their relationship with a woman."

So, maybe that wasn't the exact conversation but I honestly can't picture what else should could have actually been doing with this "reimagining".  Let's starting with that, reimagining.  When I think of that, I think of, you know, an actual REIMAGINING, not just the literal flip flopping of genders with leaving the same dialogue, unless it doesn't seem "manly" enough.  Was it supposed to be creating gender fluidity by leaving the same traits for each character but just changing the names, except when the author deems something needs to be specifically male to be okay, i.e. the attempted rape is now an attempted assault situation for Beau? Or what about Royal being assaulted in the stead of Rosalie's rape(s)?  Because men can't be raped, only assaulted.  =X   Maybe I'm just overthinking this, but this is a huge no for me.  

For the plus side of this, she did at least something decent by changing the ending. I must say that I quite enjoyed just wiping out the need for the rest of the series.  Not to mention the ability to milk the supposed gender-bending for 3 more books. 

 I'll willingly admit that I actually liked Twilight and the sequels.  It's a mindless entertainment that entertained the hell of out me.  I don't feel the need to profess my undying love to Stephenie Meyer for her amazing work of literary perfection, but I still enjoyed it even when I was making fun of some of the more ridiculous aspects of it.  So, this take on it just made all of those ridiculous aspects glaringly obvious and really, really awkward.  Really awkward.  It added absolutely nothing to the Twilight Saga but anger and frustration over Meyer's opinion on what a gender-bent book should entail.  

So, to sum this up. Just don't do it. Save your masochism for something else.  

Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer

A mixed review.  Sort of.

Kudos to Stephanie Meyer for figuring out how to write a story about what teenage girls, or middle aged women with teenage girl hearts, really want: to be adored and pursued by the unattainable and unique gorgeous man/men of the world, despite being clumsy, feeling stupid, and making huge mistakes all the time. Meyer made bundles of bucks of this idea, and if nothing else, got lots of people reading who might otherwise have been watching stupid TV shows.

Shame on Stepanie Meyer for not taking the time to do research into vampire legends (sparkling vegetarian vampires?), or bothering write above a fourth grade lexile. Such an opportunity, lost. I sometimes felt the star of this novel was the vampire's surly dark handsomeness, as it is mentioned a ridiculously high number of times.

I read the first book because all my (female) students were reading it, and I like to stay current with what they are reading. Since then, I have not found the motivation to finish the series. In fairness to the author, this may be partially because I am fundamentally disposed to dislike anything that every else thinks is great. But mostly it's because I did not find any of the great truths of life buried in the story. Nor did I find anyone particularly likable, no sympathetic people for whom I could cheer.

Good stories have truth in them. This one just has sparkly (??)  vampires and breathless girlfriends whose lives are meaningless without the adoration of their boyfriends.

Which leads me to the most condemning thing a reader can say about a book:  I was bored.

I am a girl named Cory

Who really likes to read stories

I suck at rhyming

But that’s just fine…ing

And fa la la la la.

This is a book about poetry

That doesn’t like to show us things

It tells us it’s speshul

It tells us it’s different

When really it’s just the same old shit.

Fin.