Eclipse (Book three in the Twilight saga)

Bella Swan has managed to escape death in a number of ways already, whether she has been spending lots of time with her vampire boyfriend or not. In this third book in the Twilight saga, Bella faces down what should be certain death yet again: this time someone is creating a vampire army in the nearby city of Seattle, and eventually it becomes clear that the proximity of these terrifyingly strong and bloodthirsty creatures is not a coincidence.

In the meantime, she and Edward are close again and spending almost all of their time together, and Bella is trying to figure out how to handle her now complicated relationship with her best friend Jacob, who just happens to be a werewolf — and in love with her, though she just wants to be friends. Add to that the Volturi’s expectations that Bella is going to join the ranks of the Cullen family as an immortal creature, as well as Edward’s expectations for how that should come about, and she has a lot to think about.

Eclipse is the most action-packed of the three books so far, which generally seems to be the one of the series that is most interesting to male readers (still the mushy love story, sure, but they can’t resist the vampire and werewolf fighting), as well as ramping up the love angles. Girls can’t resist the two hot guys fighting for Bella’s undying love, and the direction in which Bella and Edward’s love story heads. It’s still a gripping tale that sends the swoon-o-meter spinning wildly and is just a fun story that can’t be put down.

Rated: Mild. This could almost go moderate for young readers, but I’m going to call it a mild. The language use is minimal; just a few uses of mild expletives. The action level can be high and fast-paced, but the details of violence aren’t much more than the previous two books. Again, they mainly revolve around some details of tearing up vampire bodies and burning the pieces, but there’s not really much more than that — there’s a lot of talk about fighting, but really not that many gory details, considering we’re talking about vampires. The main concern here is the amount of kissing (over and over it’s about how the kissing makes her heart race and her skin feel overheated, and so on and so on, and she always talks about his perfect body), and how Bella wants it to go further than that and is sometimes pushing Edward for more (there are a couple of scenes where she is trying to unbutton their shirts, but he stops her). He still continues to tell her that they won’t do any more than kiss, and that in limited amounts. This book does start to talk more about their getting married, and that they will plan to have sex then.