For what was, I think, the tenth anniversary of the original Twilight, Meyer published this rather odd book, which is the story of Twilight retold, sometimes with no revisions to the prose at all, with the genders of the most of the characters flipped. So, we have the vampiric and violent Edythe Cullen and the waifish, shy Beau Swan. There had been talk of something new in the Twilight-verse (God, just kill me now) coming out for the tenth anniversary, so it kind of feels like this was a more or less last-minute “Oh God I have no idea what to even do oh this will be easy” kind of thing. There are portions of the book where almost no changes were made other than flipping the names and pronouns, so this was probably a very fast process for Meyer, seemingly a pretty fast writer as it stands. But if she was trying to take a quick and easy way out, she also lucked into something kind of interesting, at least in theory. Because it is odd to read the story with the genders flipped; so much of the hand-wringing, at least some of which was justified in my opinion, about the original Twilight was the bad messaging it was sending to girls in terms of framing Edward’s intensely and overtly violent behavior and dialogue as romantic. How does it read when it’s an small, seemingly weak waif who’s threatening to murder her significant other? Well . . . interestingly. I don’t know that this really gets at anything in a meaningful way as far as gender roles, gender stereotypes and such, but it probably comes closer than the original. Still, is this worth reading? I mean, you know the answer to that question. 1 star.
tl;dr – lazy gender-swapping premise is luckily also kind of interesting, though only for a while, in the way it makes you think about gender roles; everything else here is as bad as the original. 1 star.