As the love triangle heats up in the third book, Bella must choose between her friendship with Jacob and her romance with Edward — and her decision could change the fate of vampires and werewolves forever.

As Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob — knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf.

With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella has one more decision to life or death. But which is which?

I will never understand why these books are so popular because it feels like nothing ever happens in them. The writing is also fairly mediocre. This book is over 500 pages long and absolutely did not need to be. It could have easily been cut by 200 pages and still told the exact same story. I ended up skimming large portions because there was simply too much description and too many unnecessary details that added little to the overall plot.

In this installment, we’re back with the trio of Edward, Bella, and Jacob for more teenage angst, drama, and endless bickering. At times, it was downright cringe-worthy, though I can see why younger readers might find it entertaining. Reading this series for the first time in my mid-forties, I found much of it silly, absurd, immature, and very juvenile. That said, I recognize that I am not the target audience. I mainly picked up the series because I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

Edward and Bella are just as annoying and insufferable as ever, while Jacob became almost intolerable in this book. Honestly, I’m not happy with the way Stephenie Meyer chose to write his character. Jacob has been one of my favorites in the series, along with Alice, but I don’t feel like he was done justice here. He suddenly became far more aggressive, manipulative, and controlling than in the previous books. I especially disliked the scene where he forced himself on Bella. That behavior felt completely out of character based on what we’d seen from him before. It genuinely surprised me, and it made me angry.

The love triangle is dialed up significantly in this book, which had me secretly hoping Bella might change her mind. Unfortunately, I’ve already seen the movies, so I knew that wasn’t going to happen. One aspect I did enjoy was seeing Edward and Jacob call a truce and find some common ground. Despite their differences, they both genuinely love Bella and want to protect her from Victoria and the Volturi.

I also enjoyed watching the vampire coven and werewolf pack unite against a common enemy to protect their hometown from the newborn vampires wreaking havoc in Seattle. However, in typical Twilight fashion, we don’t actually get to witness much of the battle itself. Instead, we’re left hearing about it from a distance. I’m glad the movie chose to show viewers the action because the book barely gives us a glimpse of the fight between the newborns, the Cullens, and the werewolves. It feels like such a waste to spend more than 500 pages building toward a major conflict and then not let readers experience it firsthand. There was so much untapped potential here. This could have been a much more exciting story if more things had actually happened on the page.

I’ll finish the series simply because I want to see how it all ends, but my expectations are extremely low. As an older adult, I wouldn’t personally recommend these books. I found them rather boring, overly descriptive, and filled with far too much dialogue where very little actually happens. However, I do appreciate that there’s no language and no spice, making them a clean option for teenage readers.

**This book is part of a Twilight Saga real-time reaction episode, which you can listen to here.