Great conflict makes for great reading. But great conflict doesn’t necessarily require epic battles, or diabolical villains. It doesn’t require constant friction between the hero and heroine or tragic subplots, either. So what else makes for great conflict? Choices — gut-wrenching, life-altering choices — and the consequences of those choices. Like those choices the characters must make in The Twilight Saga.

The very first book, Twilight, begins with a choice: Bella’s choice to leave her mother in sunny, dry Phoenix to live with her dad in cold, wet Forks, so that her mom can travel with her new husband. It’s this choice that sets the stage for Bella’s life-changing meeting with Vampirific Edward Cullen.

Bella is faced with three crucial choices in the Saga:

• The choice between human and vampire, and thus, between mortality and immortality;
• The choice between Edward and Jacob; and
• The choice between Edward and her family

Bella’s choice to become a vampire not only means forsaking her humanness, but also forsaking her family and friends, especially her best friend, Jacob Black, who is genetically-programmed to hate vampires. Of course, this choice has many consequences which lead to more choices.

More importantly, along with suffering through the horrific transformation process, this choice also means possibly sacrificing her soul to spend eternity with Edward.

To make matters worse, Rosalie, Edward’s adoptive sister, believes Bella is making the wrong choice in choosing to become a vampire. All other members of the Cullen Clan did not have a choice in becoming a vampire, so Rosalie resents Bella’s decision:

Can’t you see that I’d trade everything I have to be you? You have the choice that I didn’t have and you’re choosing wrong!

In New Moon, Edward chooses to leave Bella after his brother, Jasper, tries to kill her. The decision is painful, but he believes he is only doing what’s best for Bella. This choice leads to her friendship with Jacob. Nevertheless, when Edward returns, Bella chooses him over Jacob. Poor Jacob. You can’t help but wonder if Jacob has a masochistic streak.

Even so, Jacob hopes to make Bella’s final decision between Jacob and humanness, and Edward and vampirism, that much more difficult because of the relationship Bella forged with Jacob in Edward’s absence. He tells Bella that Edward is “going to have to deal with the consequences of that choice [leaving her] — me.”

Her choice of Edward and vampirism comes with serious consequences and great sacrifices. Choosing Jacob would mean remaining human, living a normal life (as normal as a life with a vampire-hunting werewolf can be), and staying with her family.

At the end of Eclipse, Jacob tells Bella “I’m exactly right for you, Bella. It would have been effortless for us — comfortable, as easy as breathing. I was the natural path your life would have taken . . .”

She knows this. She knows that if they lived in a world with no monsters or magic, Jacob would have been her choice. “He was my soul mate in that world.” But that world doesn’t exist. The world that she lives in holds “something so strong that it could not exist in a rational world.” That something is Edward. And because of that, Bella tells Jacob, “I never had a choice.”

But the choices don’t stop there. Throughout the books, the secondary, and even minor characters, are faced with choices, and as a reader you want to keep reading to see what their choice is and what happens as a result.

As a co-hero, Jacob is faced with his fair share of choices. When he learns he’s a werewolf, he chooses not to assume his rightful role as Alpha in what has, to that point, been Sam’s pack. He also chooses to stay friends with Bella, despite her decision to become a vampire.

In Breaking Dawn, the final installment in the series, these two choices eventually lead to another, more difficult decision: the choice to leave his pack, turn his back on his brothers and sister, to protect the very thing he is genetically-programmed to hate, in order to also protect Bella.

Jacob: How did everything get messed up and twisted so that I was here now, all alone, an unwilling Alpha, cut off from my brothers, choosing vampires over them?

Jacob’s decision divides his pack and puts him in the untenable position of possibly fighting his brothers and sister to the death.

But Seth, one of Jacob’s werewolf brothers, also makes the same difficult choice to abandon his other wolf brothers, along with his own biological sister, to protect Bella. Later, Leah, Seth’s sister, makes the same decision to leave Sam’s pack to run with Jacob, even if it means protecting a coven of vampires she hates, and a girl she detests, just so she doesn’t have to be the “pathetic ex-girlfriend [Sam] can’t get away from.” For Leah, the choice seems to be between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

In Breaking Dawn, Bella is faced with her most difficult choice yet. When she gets pregnant, she chooses to carry Edward’s offspring to term even if it means her death and the loss of Edward, the one thing she wanted so desperately, and so willingly sacrificed everything for. Even when everyone (except Rosalie) wants Bella to abort the fetus, Carlisle understands the imperative of choice:

I can’t ignore her will. It wouldn’t be right to make such a choice for her, to force her.

The Twilight Saga presents many choices for the characters that live within it. What’s more, when faced with choices, the characters do not take the easy way out. They make the choices whose consequences are clouded with fear and doubt, possible loss and heartache. But often those choices also hold the most promise.

What books have you read lately where the hero or heroine has difficult choices to make? What were the consequences of those choices? Did those choices and consequences you keep glued to the story?