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A Tenth Anniversary Surprise: Gender-Swapped Twilight Introduces Beau and Edythe

life-and-death-twilight-reimaginedIt’s common practice for publishers to release new editions of books on major anniversaries, but Stephenie Meyer has gone one step better.

EW reports that Meyer has taken a trick from the fanfic toolbox and swapped the genders of her protagonists. The new edition of Twilight, Life and Death, isn’t the retelling of Twilight from the viewpoint of Edward which fans were hoping for (probably a good thing, given how atrocious Gray was). Instead Life and Death  features a female vampire named Edythe and a boy named Beau (short for Beaufort).

The book is 442 pages long. It’s not clear how much work was put into rewriting it, but EW did report that:

Meyer explains in her foreword to the anniversary edition of the novel that she decided to go with the gender bending to underscore her position that Bella isn’t a “damsel in distress” as certain critics have charged. Rather, the author insists, the character is a “human in distress,” or as Meyer calls her, “a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillians.” Meyer also takes issue with the criticism that Bella was “too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing.” The author mentions, too, that Beau is “more OCD” than Bella was and that he’s “totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder all the time.”

Meyer says writing the piece was “fun, but also really fast and easy.”According to the foreword, the rewrite allowed her to correct some errors that always bothered her and to re-edit the piece for grammar and word choice issues. She also altered some elements of the mythology for consistency.

The book is available today in bookstores, including the Kindle Store, where it’s the #1 new release in children’s horror (not joking). This is a $13 ebook, so I won’t be buying it.  Instead, I’ll wait for my library to stock it.

Are you going to buy it?

EW

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Comments


Lorinza October 8, 2015 um 5:55 am

Hi, does anyone know when it will be available in South Africa?

Nate Hoffelder October 8, 2015 um 7:52 am

I’m not sure when the print book will make it there. Can you buy the ebook?


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