Surprise! Twilight is still a thing: Ten years after Edward Cullen and Bella Swan made vampires virtually inescapable, Stephenie Meyer is back to turn your tweens once again. In celebration of the first book’s anniversary, Meyer has rewritten Twilight with the genders of the saga’s star-crossed lovers reversed. Meet Beau and Edythe, main characters of the newly feminist reading of the series now dubbed Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, out today. In this version, Bella is Beau, a teen boy who moves to Forks, Washington, and finds himself enamored with the vampire Edythe, the female version of Edward. Meyer explained on Good Morning America that the idea behind the new 442-page book was to put to rest repeated criticism of the original series that it reduced Bella to a “damsel in distress†trope.
In making Bella a man in the new book, Meyer says that character now becomes a more universal “human in distress†who dispels the idea that falling in love is a gender-specific experience. And any notion that Bella was ever “too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing†should become irrelevant with the introduction of this new perspective. “Gender and species aside, Twilight has always been a story about the magic and obsession and frenzy of first love,†Meyer explains. “So I thought to myself, Well, what if I put that theory to the test?†Meyer isn’t the only author to revisit the work that launched their career. Earlier this year, E.L. James released a new version of Fifty Shades of Grey written entirely from Christian Grey’s point of view.