Marianne (Australia) (2012/10/20): Fifty Shades of Grey is the first book in the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E.L. James. When 21-year-old college student Anastasia Steele interviews enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc., Christian Grey, she does it as a favour for her unwell roommate. She’s not expecting such a young (27 year-old) attractive man. Grey is apparently attracted to Ana as well. Ana is sexually inexperienced and he warns her off because he is, by his own admission, “fifty shades of f***ed up”, but ends up propositioning her anyway, to become his Submissive. This novel , set over about four weeks, is frustratingly slow moving: if 500 pages = 50 shades of Grey, then it takes 8 shades to get to the first kiss, and a full 25 shades before Ana agrees to sign the Dominant/Submissive contract (although she never actually does). 30 shades to reach a spanking. I found myself thinking, just get on with it, will you! Throughout, there is rather too much of the blushing and breathlessness and ohhh he’s so hot. Ana and her subconscious and her inner goddess spend much of the novel overthinking, overanalysing every word and look. And I sometimes found Ana to be either very naïve or incredibly stupid: did she really think that her experience in the Red Room of Pain, a room filled with implements designed for punishment, was NOT going to be painful? There is some humour and plenty of sex. Literature it certainly is not. Soft porn ? Probably. Romance, erotica, yes. Apart from Ana, the characters are rather two-dimensional: after 500+ pages we still don’t know why Christian Grey is like this. Although Ana’s mother, Carla, does have some sound advice about the complexity of men. Will I invest the time to read another thousand pages of this? Not sure…… blklacquer (USA: TX) (2013/03/19): I may be the only one who thinks this book sucked, but it did, I couldn't even read 50 pages of it. Ana is so annoying..I just couldn't.
