Fifty Shades of Grey is about innocent Anastasia Steele, a clumsy virginal recent college graduate being seduced by the worldly and handsome Christian Grey. Ana is shy, clumsy and unsure of herself around men and can’t figure out what it is about herself that attracts Christian. She soon finds out and the answer blows her innocent mind.
This series started off as Twilight fan fiction. For those of you not in the know (as I wasn’t), fan fiction means essentially that a novice writer takes aspects of a book they have liked, and write something, generally posting a chapter at a time on a website. Often it might be the imagined back story for a minor character, or that might take the characteristics of some characters and put them into a different setting, which is what EL James has done with FSOG.
The web version took off and the popularity led to it being published by a small firm as an ebook only. The extreme popularity of the ebook led to a bigger deal for a print version with Random House. Its popularity continues to soar. A recent Stuff article states that in Auckland Library there are over 700 reserves on these books!
This series is being touted as starting a new genre: Mommy porn, and getting wives back into bed with their husbands. It is erotica with a touch of mild BDSM. There is a lot of commentary about the BDSM aspect out there, with people shocked about references to Christian beating Ana. I’m not into BDSM myself, but even so, I found that side of it very tame. In the book, Christian describes sex with no props or toys or smacking as “vanilla sex”. I felt like even the bondage scenes still felt very vanilla. Maybe this was because the language is so innocent. I couldn’t decide whether this was a clever trick of the author to show how naïve Ana is (virgin at 22 and never even “self helped”!?!?! I just couldn’t buy that), or whether the author couldn’t bring herself to use more titillating language, but when Ana says his long fingers touch her “down there”, or gasps because “his words, they’re so seductive” (what were those seductive words? “I can’t wait to be inside you”!), it felt like a sex scene being described by a 12 year old. Yep, a 12 year old talking about sex was the impression I got during most of the intimate scenes… not the kind of thing that makes me want to jump my hubby, actually! And as for referring to having two orgasms in a row as being like going through the spin cycle of the washing machine! Hello, Mommy porn??? We don’t need to be reminded of the piles of washing needing to be done thanks.
The whole way through reading this book I kept thinking, good on EL James for giving this a go, but what a shame you didn’t have the guidance of a good editor. It has the potential to be a good book but also has some crucial flaws. It is really repetitive. Did I mention Edward, I mean Christian has long fingers? Yes, he’s running them through his hair again, or her hair, or wherever. He’s quite good looking, Ana thinks. She thinks that a lot. She also blushes a lot, rolls her eyes and bites her lip and says crap maybe every 4th page or so. Ana gets some advice from her inner goddess quite a lot too. The sex scenes are also far too frequent, repetitive, clunky and not very steamy. Her orgasms, which are frequent, also make her shatter into tiny fragments.
The part I enjoyed most about this book was the email conversations. They were quirky, fun and even occasionally made me laugh out loud. I wished the personality shown in the emails came out more at other parts of the book.
To be honest, and you probably get the idea by now, I was really disappointed with this book. It has a very shallow plot held together flimsily by some blah sex scenes. I hated Christian and I just wanted to slap Ana myself to get some sense into her. I kept reading to the end, and I plan to read the others just to find out whether Ana actually gets some balls or not. I know that lots of people love it and I just can’t figure out why. There are way better erotic novels out there, in my opinion. Why has this one rocketed off the charts? I was hoping to read parts of this aloud to my husband, but when the sex scenes made me either laugh, scoff or cringe; I don’t think it’s going to be that helpful.
