Ghosty

I wanted to love this book and I wonder if I would have had I read it at sixteen. As an adult I can take it with a grain of salt and see past the underlying and probably accidental lesson.

(slight spoiler)

This girl literally is content doing nothing forever, until an interesting boy comes along and makes her long for more. Teenage girls don't need to be saved by teenage boys. Worse, real life teenage boys suck. Call me bitter but I couldn't get around the constant hopeful tone that this dream boy was everything she ever needed.

Past that, this book was interesting and still worth the read.

I read this book in one sitting and I loved it, the writing is perfect and really makes you feel something, I'll definitely read this a couple more times and highlight so many parts

My highlights:

Midnight Sun - Stephenie Meyer (Highlight: 49)

───────────────

◆ 1. FIRST SIGHT

▪ It was hard to imagine surviving with senses so incredibly dull.

▪ I was a vampire, and she had the sweetest blood I'd smelled in more than eighty years.

▪ I knew what had to happen now. The girl would have to come sit beside me, and I would have to kill her.

▪ I had never killed innocents. And now I planned to slaughter twenty of them at once.

▪ it would take me, at most, five seconds to end every life in this room.

▪ It was sophistry to think that by saving the nineteen humans in this room with effort and patience, I would be less of a monster when I killed this innocent girl.

▪ I didn't have to go to her home. I didn't have to kill her. Obviously, I was a rational, thinking creature, and I had a choice. There was always a choice.

◆ 5. INVITATIONS

▪ I would not destroy Bella's future. If I was destined to love her, then wasn't avoiding her the very least I could do?

▪ My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?

◆ 6. BLOOD TYPE

▪ I didn't know how to do this. How to court her as a normal, human, modern man in the year two thousand and five.

◆ 7. MELODY

▪ Love doesn't always come in convenient packages.

◆ 8. GHOST

▪ I accidentally uprooted the young spruce tree my hand was resting on when he pinched a strand of her hair between his fingers.

▪ I felt an uncomfortable spasm of guilt. Because what I was doing now was not precisely good, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as my nightly pursuits. I wasn't technically even trespassing now—the base of this tree grew from the next lot over—let alone doing something more felonious. But I knew that when night came, I would continue to do wrong.

◆ 9. PORT ANGELES

▪ “More theories?”
“Mm-hm.” She chewed on another bite, entirely nonchalant. As if she weren't discussing the aspects of a demon with the demon himself.

▪ Suddenly, as she ate, a strange comparison entered my head. For just a second, I saw Persephone, pomegranate in hand. Dooming herself to the underworld.

▪ My skin would disgust her. She would run away.

◆ 10. THEORY

▪ There, at the top of the stairs, was a promising-looking cupboard. I opened it hopefully and found what I was looking for. I selected the thickest blanket from the tiny linen closet and took it back into her room. I would return it before she woke, and no one would be the wiser.
Holding my breath, I cautiously spread the blanket over her. She didn't react to the added weight. I returned to the rocking chair.

◆ 12. COMPLICATIONS

▪ It was oddly consoling to know that I wasn't the only one living out a tragic love story. Heartbreak was everywhere.

▪ Bella was like a soap bubble—fragile and ephemeral. Temporary.

▪ How silly humans were, to let a six-inch height difference confound their happiness.

▪ Why would she laugh at the suggestion that I could kill her, when she knew that it was entirely true?
What was wrong with her?

◆ 13. ANOTHER COMPLICATION

▪ Cursing my curiosity, I returned to my questions.

▪ Perhaps my obvious fascination with every detail of her personality would convince her of the obsessive level of my interest.

▪ if I could have kept it tidy enough to be able to actually walk into it. My room here is bigger and less of a disaster, but that's because I haven't been here long enough make a serious mess.”
I made my face smooth, hiding the fact that I knew very well what her room was like here, and also my surprise that her room in Phoenix had been more cluttered.

▪ “It's twilight,” I said. The time when vampires came out to play—when we never had to fear that a shifting cloud might cause us trouble—when we could enjoy the last remnants of light in the sky without worrying that we would be exposed.

▪ I thought of the stars she'd described in Phoenix and wondered if they were like the stars in Alaska—so bright and clear and close. I wished that I could take her there tonight so we could make the comparison. But she had a normal life to lead.

▪ I felt suddenly sorry that this particular boy was born my enemy. His was the rare kind of mind that was easy to be inside. Restful, almost.

▪ She causes you pain.
I shook my head. “I cause my own pain. It's not her fault.”
It's not your fault, either.
“I am what I am.”
And that's not your fault.

◆ 15. PROBABILITY

▪ Her mind raced through a flipbook of futures. Bella's face from a thousand different angles, always tinted gray, sunless. She was thinner, unfamiliar hollows beneath her cheekbones, deep circles under her eyes, her expression empty. One could call it lifeless—but it would only be a metaphor. Not like the other visions.

▪ I let my head fall into my hands. I felt sick—like a damaged human, a victim of disease.

▪ For a few moments, I thought seriously about killing myself. It was the only way I knew to be sure that the monster didn't survive.

▪ Maybe I was wrong. But if I was right... how exasperating! How endearing! Her life had never been in deeper peril, but she still cared that I, the very menace threatening her life, liked her appearance.

▪ What I was doing was basking, drowning, wallowing in my love for Bella. I didn't think it would be difficult to keep doing that.

◆ 17. CONFESSIONS

▪ And like a fool, I fell back into my immature efforts to be amusing. “I'm not thirsty today, honestly.”
I actually winked at her. One would think I was thirteen instead of a hundred and four.

▪ “I'm here... which, roughly translated, means I would rather die than stay away from you.”

▪ The electricity ricocheted around the inside of my stomach and I wondered why humans had thought to name such a wild sensation butterflies.

◆ 18. MIND OVER MATTER

▪ Tooth and Claw

◆ 23. GOODBYES

▪ Could a dead heart break?

◆ 25. RACE

▪ Edward, it's impossible.
The image of myself astride the sleek black motorcycle was so appealing that for a second I ignored her.

▪ For a tenth of a second, I was back in my Volvo in Forks, thinking of ways to kill myself.

▪ Emmett would never... but maybe Jasper. He alone could feel what I felt. Maybe he would want to end my life, just to escape that pain. But probably he would run away instead. He wouldn't want to hurt Alice. So that left the longer trip to Italy.

◆ 28. THREE CONVERSATIONS

▪ But this wasn't life or death for either of them the way it was for me. That was my life on the gurney. My life, pale and unresponsive, covered in tubes and tape and plaster. I kept myself together as best I could.

▪ Pomegranate seeds and my underworld.

▪ And then I did something I hadn't done in a century.
Curled there in a ball on the floor, motionless with agony... I prayed.

◆ 29. INEVITABILITY

▪ Her eyes focused on the machine beeping out her heart's excesses, and narrowed. “That's going to be embarrassing.”

▪ “I won't,” I told her, while I mentally qualified my answer. Not until you're whole again. Not until you're ready. Not until I find the strength.

▪ Until you're healthy, until you're ready. Until I find the strength I need.

◆ EPILOGUE: AN OCCASION

▪ there were actual tears brimming in her eyes and she had one hand clenched around the door handle as though she wanted to throw herself from the car rather than face the horror of a high school dance.

▪ “So ready for this to be the end,” I sighed, stroking my finger down the side of her face. “For this to be the twilight of your life, though your life has barely started. You're ready to give up everything.”
“It's not the end, it's the beginning,” she whispered.
“I'm not worth it.”

One day I'll finish reading this book (I've stopped at halfway through over a year ago because it's so bad) but for now 0/10 would not recommend, equally cringey as sad girls. Not being intentionally mean; I enjoyed all her poetry books before her fiction attempts.

I will say though that not only does it feel like the biggest cop-out to never include any of Verity's “god-tier” level writing (but I get it, taste is subjective) but to then have scenes like when she first reads her poetry to a group and it goes like “I started reading my poetry, I was so scared and nervous, but everyone gasped the entire time and by the end everyone was crying and applauding me saying they'd never heard anything so beautiful” especially as this reads entirely as a self-insert fanfic.

Also the amount of complaints about the ‘haters' who ‘hate-review' books just to be mean is clearly Lang being triggered and offended that people don't like her fiction books. Get over yourself.


MY DRAFTED REVIEW FROM WHILE I WAS READING:

“I hated everything about this book. Nothing about it works. The characters are unrelatable but also unbelievable. No one has any depth at all.”
- The opening to my review for Sad Girls, which also applies here.

This book is trash and let me tell you why. If you're a normal sane person and you also read Sad Girls, you understand. This book is the same. I might be all over the place but there's just so much crap.

Spoilers ahead.

Poemsia is a book about a girl who writes poetry and works in a bookstore. We're supposed to believe her poetry is the holy grail of anything ever written, yet we're conveniently never shown anything she writes. I understand this could be because taste is subjective, but it still just feels like a cop out. Also we're supposed to believe that the bookstore she works at is “the last one in Sydney that still has a poetry section” and honestly, this entire book is too full of itself.

Just like the main character in Sad Girls, Verity Wolf is very aloof and unaware of reality and gets everything handed to her, completely unrealistically. She idolizes this one poet who got famous by being discovered through some site. Her best friend Jessica says things like “you could be famous too, your poetry is better!” and then decides to take on the role of publicist, gathering Verity's poems, and putting them together in the form of a physical book with a beautiful cover that Jessica designed but I can't remember what was nice about it.

Verity ends up getting her poetry noticed through Instagram and then people actually start buying her book, and obviously it shoots up to #1 on the bestseller charts or something.

She meets this guy at the bookstore who goes by the nickname Sash because of course he does. Lang Leav's one and only way of adding character depth to the Love Interest seems to be by giving him a fun nickname. (At least Sash is more bearable than “Duck”). He's older and we're supposed to believe that they're instant soul mates and they love each other immediately. He's also pretentious and they bond over how they're the only people left who like classic literature and that hipster bookstore.

He has cool friends but most importantly this one bitchy hot girl who Verity is jealous of immediately because Sash and her have a long messy history of dating and hooking up. This girl is also pretentious, the most out of everyone in this book as this is her main character trait, and she likes to trash on every book ever written aside from a handful of classics or current unknowns. However she might be the only two dimensional character in this book as she's shown to be caring, generous and charitable in her personal life when she's not being an absolute snob in some indie café. Also she hates Verity because she's hung up on Sash even though he's clearly an idiot who thinks the love of his life is some wide-eyed nineteen year old that he just met.

After a couple dates they have a scene on a rooftop where they tell each other they're in love and she says “what is this?” and he says “I don't know, maybe ... the rest of our lives?” like honestly what kind of douchebag. And then they do it in his car but it's “romantic” and it's revealed that she's only ever done it with one other guy, also in a car.

Also Verity thinks her friends are better and more normal than Sash's friends but they're also crap. At one point the coffee shop that Jessica's boyfriend works at is closing or something and they're like “oh no! This is the ONLY good coffee shop around, where are we going to go now?” Like. Literally anywhere.

This series never failed to amaze me and immediately after finishing, I reread Unwind four years after first reading it to remind myself why it's usually the first book I recommend to people. The characters have come so far, these stories are engrossing, twisted, and believable as ever. These characters will always stick with me.