Review:
In her foreword, Stephenie Meyer writes that this book was inspired by complaints that Bella was too much a "damsel in distress" and too consumed by her feelings for Edward. Meyer was inspired to write this gender-swapped version of Twilight because she felt it would show that the things Bella experienced and the way she reacted wouldn't have changed in the slightest had Bella been male instead of female.
And so we have this book, which follows the same plot as Twilight and even, I'm pretty sure, uses much of the same text word-for-word, with a few pronoun changes. I didn't have a copy of Twilight to compare it to, and it's been years since I last read Twilight, but even I could recognize chunks of text.
The two characters I know for sure weren't gender-swapped are Charlie and Renee, Bella's (or in this case, Beaus's) parents. Meyer explained her reasons for that in her foreword as well, although I think she could have managed to make the change work if she'd really wanted.
Anyway, initially I liked Beau well enough. Then, like Bella, he met Edythe (Edward) and became consumed by her to the point that he stopped caring that she might break down at any point and kill him. It was just as annoying and horrible with Beau as it was with Bella. Plus, it didn't seem as thought Meyer had thought through the gender-swapping well enough. Imagine a high school guy suddenly becoming starry-eyed over a girl, spending all his time with her even when he was supposed to be with friends, and letting her drive him to school multiple times, in 2005. I'd have thought at least one guy would tease him for it a little, but instead everyone went wide-eyed and just accepted it.
After a while, I considered DNFing. This was basically like rereading Twilight, except with bonus ghost of Twilight haunting the edges. I continued on, although now that I've finished, my advice to others who are unsure, for similar reasons, whether to DNF is just to skip to Chapter 22 and read from there to the end. The one change Meyer makes is to the ending. Honestly, this version probably worked better for me than the original. The gender-swapping alone made Renesmee an impossibility (yay!), but the change to the ending made a few other annoying things from the later books either unlikely or impossible.
Did this book need to exist? No. Did it prove what Meyer wanted it to prove? No - like I said, there were moments when it felt like Meyer didn't think through the gender-swapping well enough and how characters would really have reacted. Also, both Beau and Bella's lack of survival instincts after they met their respective love interests was concerning. I'm still convinced that neither of the two were actually in love, but rather reacting like mice infected with toxoplasmosis being confronted by a cat.
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