Life and Death
By Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Young Adult Paranormal
Personal Rating: 7/10

Anyone reading this who knows me personally is probably thinking, What? You giving less then a 10/10 to something Stephenie Meyer wrote? Well I am just as surprised as you are. I am a huge Twilight fan, so when I saw that she was publishing a novel length special feature for the tenth anniversary, well it's safe to say that I was pretty excited. The novel game as a double book: the original Twilight on the front and then you flip it over for Life and Death. I really had no idea what the extra book was going to be about, but once I started reading it I was...surprised.

Life and Death is basically the story of Twilight but gender bent. So instead of a human Bella and vampire Edward, we have human boy, Beau, and vampire girl, Edyth. And the rest of the characters are switched around as well. In the forward for this book, Stephenie Meyer explains that the reason she wrote this was in response to everyone's complaints that Bella was a constant damsel in distress. By switching the gender of the human, she shows that Bella is simply a human in distress. Any human--male or female--would have a hard time coming across as strong when they are surrounded by extremely strong and dangerous vampires. I understand what she was trying to do and I definitely saw her point, but I wasn't a big fan of how she went about getting the point across. This book is the exact same plot of Twilight and the same dialog, only switched to accommodate the gender switch and the very different--but interesting--ending. If she would have written this book with a slightly different story line I would have been a lot more intrigued. Instead it just felt like I was re-reading my favorite book in a sort of bad fan-fiction flip.

Would I recomend this book to anyone? No, not really. It was still a fine book--if I had read that before I ever read Twilight--but because it was so similar, and yet so strange, I had a hard time getting into it.