Title: Eclipse
Author: Stephanie Meyer
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 629
Rating: 3.5/5
Alrighty, so we’ve reached book three in the Twilight series. And like my review of New Moon, I think the issue I’m going to come up against is that most of the things I could say about the individual books could be said about the series as a whole.
The main point of difference here is that a huge amount of time is given over to the history and the agreements between the vampires and the werewolves. Book one is about the vampires, book two is about the werewolves, and book three is about the relationships between the two.
Perhaps the biggest point of contention is that Bella wants Edward to turn her into a vampire because she’s being threatened by an old vampire clan and it seems to her to be the safest way to make sure that she’s kept safe.
The problem is that the peace treaty between the werewolves and the vampires becomes null and void if a vampire bites a human. And of course, Jacob doesn’t want Bella to change because he has a thing for her and she keeps on leading him on. Perhaps that’s why he comes across as such a douchebag by this point.
The plot of this one is decent enough, and it’s starting to feel darker than the first book in a way that’s reminiscent of the Harry Potter series. This book is the longest to date, too. That can sometimes feel as though the author is doing it gratuitously just for the sake of things, but that’s not the case here. It’s the length it is because that’s how long it needed to be to tell the story.
I think if I’d been reading the physical book then I would have grown impatient with it, but I’ve been reading on the exercise bike at the gym of late and there’s a stigma towards the Twilight books that I’d prefer to avoid. Someone would definitely have said something to me as a man in his thirties reading Eclipse in a public place.
But the audio book actually made things much more enjoyable, especially at certain points such as when Bella was being told the story of the first vampires and werewolves. It almost felt like we were sitting around a campfire with a group of friends.
Other than that, this book felt kind of like what it was, which is a bridge book to take us to the final book in the series. I don’t feel as though the stakes (pun intended) are as high as they are in some of the other series that I’ve read, but it’s been a decent enough read and I’m glad that I picked it up. I’ll be grabbing the spin-offs, too.
I will say that I had a big problem with Jacob’s behaviour and the way that he was portrayed. He basically assaulted Bella twice by kissing her against her will, and there was some pretty rough descriptive prose about how she was clenching her fists to get through it or not putting up any resistance in the hope that he’d lose interest if she didn’t fight. Then he tried to gaslight her by telling her that she was in love with him, and the worst thing was, she eventually went along with it.
It actually got to the point at which I found it difficult to listen to, because all I could see was an abuser and his victim. I’m also not sure why her father just took the attitude of “boys will be boys”, given the fact that he’s a police officer who’d learned about an assault on his daughter. Is this romance?