Shawna Finnigan's Reviews > Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined

Warning: this review will contain brief spoilers from the original Twilight book and Eclipse.

Life and Death is the gender-swapped version of Twilight, meaning that all boys are changed to girls and all girls are changed to boys. The only exceptions are Renee, Charlie, and a couple of side characters. The reasoning for why some characters don’t change genders is explained in the introduction to this book. I have to say that after seeing several people say that this book was better than the original, I had high expectations, but I was quickly disappointed. The majority of this story was word for word the same as Twilight. I was hoping for something more out of this book. It was overall enjoyable though. It just didn’t add anything to the Twilight universe for me.

Most of the gender-swapped characters were unrealistic to me. It felt like the author tried so hard to make the characters be like their counterparts in Twilight that she stopped trying to make these characters feel real. The only three characters that I could imagine as real people were McKayla (Mike), Jessamine (Jasper), and Julie (Jacob). I understand why the author wanted to do a gender-swapped Twilight, but I don’t think it had the intended effect.

The rest of my review will be comparing and contrasting this book and Twilight. Since this book is nearly word for word the same as Twilight, most of my thoughts are the same as what they were with Twilight. My enjoyment of this book was hindered though by the fact that I was essentially just rereading Twilight. This book is labeled as “Twilight Reimagined” and “Tenth Anniversary Edition,” but since it didn’t change much from the original source, it didn’t live up to those big labels on the cover.

The only two major changes in the book were the attempted rape scene was changed and the ending was drastically changed. The attempted rape scene being changed was a pleasant surprise. That scene in Twilight made me incredibly uncomfortable and it felt like the story brushed over the fact that Bella almost got raped, so I preferred the change of events in Life and Death. The ending being changed seemed good in theory, but it felt a little rushed and there was tons of info-dumping. The amount of information that you get from world-building in the entire Twilight series had to essentially be condensed into less than thirty pages at the end of this book. The epilogue was so painful and depressing. Poor Charlie. He’s one of the best characters in both Life and Death and the Twilight series yet somehow he always suffers as a result of the conclusion of the stories.

The gender-swapping created major issues for Jasper’s story and Rosalie’s story. Both of these two characters’ history was shaped by their gender. Jasper was a confederate soldier and that’s a huge part of how he ended up as a vampire. Jessamine on the other hand was just randomly stolen to be turned into a vampire. Jessamine couldn’t have been a soldier in the Civil War because she was female at the time she was turned so she wouldn’t have been allowed to fight. The confederate part of Jasper’s history made me uncomfortable, but the change to making Jessamine just be randomly turned into a vampire makes Jessamine’s story feel less impactful and it felt very shallow. Rosalie was raped before she was turned and she hates being a vampire because of her infertility. I don’t mind the rape part being cut out, but cutting out the major reason why Rosalie hated being a vampire made her counterpart Royal’s story lack depth. It felt like turning Rosalie into Royal ruined the story of this character.

A good change that happened as a result of the gender swap is that there’s no Renesmee/Jacob pedophilia crap!! That was one of my biggest issues for this series and it’s impossible for that to happen with the gender-swapped version of the characters.

I think gender-swapping can be done well, but it wasn’t that great in the case of Life and Death. This story needed more variation from Twilight (even if it were just a simple rewording of most sentences) and more thought needed to be put into developing the gender-swapped character’s backstories.