Fifty Shades Trilogy: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed 3-volume Boxed Set Author: Visit Amazon's E L James Page | Language: English | ISBN:
034580404X | Format: PDF
Fifty Shades Trilogy: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed 3-volume Boxed Set Description
About the Author
E L James is a former TV executive, wife and mother of two based in West London. Since early childhood she dreamed of writing stories that readers would fall in love with, but put those dreams on hold to focus on her family and her career. She finally plucked up the courage to put pen to paper with her first novel,
Fifty Shades of Grey.
- Paperback: 1625 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (June 12, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9780345804044
- ISBN-13: 978-0345804044
- ASIN: 034580404X
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
My husband heard about this trilogy on a morning radio show and recommended I read it. I looked it up, read the product description, and decided that it didn't sound like "my kind of book." Over the next few weeks, several friends mentioned it to me. A very close friend told me, "It's about bondage. But keep an open mind. And JUST READ IT!" So I downloaded it and began doing just that...
The first few chapters of book one set the scene...naive, bookish girl meets attractive, billionaire CEO and lust ensues. The rest of book one was sex. Explicit sex. And at first it was "steamy." But I quickly found myself wondering when it would end. I read it all, though in reality, I could have skipped entire chapters and really missed nothing.
Books two and three got more into the actual story line and made me glad I stuck with it. I quickly realized that the descriptive sex scenes in book one were necessary to fully develop the two main characters. On the exterior, Christian is a powerful, worldly man but through his interactions with Anastasia, the reader begins to see his immaturity and "damaged" side. And Anastasia's oblivion over the fact that every eligible bachelor in her life is fawning over her betrays her presentation of herself as an ordinary, bumbling recent college grad. It was exciting to see the evolution of Christian and Anastasia throughout the trilogy.
To say that this is "a book about bondage" is wrong. Yes, there are a few select scenes that depict sex with restraints or spankings or floggers. But in the grand scheme of things, they were isolated, fleeting events. Instead, I would say this book is a love story. It's about the concessions we will make for the one we love and the "hard limits" that keep us true to ourselves.
I would like to say that I liked this book. I would like to say that the writing was wonderful, the characters three dimensional and the sex steamy. Unfortunately, I really can't.
Discussions about BDSM and power play relationships could have helped to mainstream alternative sexualities, but the characters were so cardboard thin that you could never really grasp why the author kept droning about them (you may already by thinking "oh my" - might as well get used to that phrase, it is used over 80 times in the first book alone).
Want to know a little bit about the characters? Ana is the dumbest person alive. Really. She appears to be an undersexed, ignorant college grad who knows nothing about her body, boundaries, safety (forgetting safe words?! Really??), independence or basic brain functioning (when there is a crazed gunwoman on the loose, she can't figure out why the fireworks were stressful for the bodyguard). Christian is a maladjusted survivor of childhood trauma who copes by sadistically beating and controlling women who look like his mother. He has "stalker-like tendencies" (which are terribly amusing to the characters in the book), a "twitchy-palm" (because threatening to beat people who do things you don't like is SOOO hot...) and is by turns taciturn and distant or clingy and needy. While I'm not against consensual erotic punishment, her lack of consent and the severity of the interactions made this book (and their relationship) a little rape-y for me.
As for the sex, which is why many have found these books so good, it is incredibly repetitive.
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