Fifty Shades of Grey is about a young virgin new grad meeting a powerful and handsome entrepreneur. She is delighted to begin a sexual relationship with him only to find that his BDSM sexual predilections frighten and confuse her. She is willing to partake because its the only way they can be together. At the end, she decides that she feels shortchanged and walks away.
That was an extremely sparse summary. I have ready many other reviews about this book and a surprising majority do not summarize the plot line. That is because one doesn't come to this book for the suspenseful plot line (except for perhaps the climax, har har). People come to this book because it is a novelty in many ways. This book represents a community people who felt overlooked by the publishing community and self published against all odds. Without the internet, fanfiction would never see the light of day. And now, with e-readers becoming a norm, a book birthed out of Twilight fandom can be a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Also, women have massive buying power, and its not common that an undiluted smutty book can be so popular.
For porn, this book is mediocre. I wouldn't say that one could throughougly enjoy this book one handed, persay. For high brow fiction, this book is just as well written as many of the other current best sellers. I was suprised. It is better than what I read of the original Twilight. Ana has a distinct personality and I can understand her actions and her rationale. She compares herself to characters in classical books. She isn't just some girl. Christian Grey is the idolized Adonis, but he is still human. He can be creepy in an old-man sort of way. The characters feel like real people that I am glad that I don't know.
The book ended awkwardly in a way that funnels me into the next book. The climax occured in the last 10 pages with her standing up to him and leaving. It doesn't feel like an end of the relationship. It felt like a brief 2 days of weeping before going back to him type of seperation. The author didn't follow the classical 5 part plot structure, seen below
It was more like this
This might not be exactly fair. One can look at the local maximas and minimas of the sprawling contract negotiation as rising and falling plot line, I just do not think this is so. Once you introduce constant hedonistic sex into a story, it edges out all other emotion in a story and the plot just stops to watch the show.
Other Notes
- They are making a movie. I bet they are going to put so much vanilla frosting on this that its going to come out rated R. I say I am not going to watch it, but I probably will.
- I feel like I understand the motivations behind Twilight now that I've read this. I never understood the plight of Bella Swan before and thought she should just head out with Jacob and let herself be happy. While I think Ana may not have been better off with Jose, I can finally see why Bella was conflicted at least.
- The book ending was not satisfying, as noted in my plot structure argument above. I hate how authors are making trilogies instead of well placed and structured individual books. I noticed this about the transition between the Hunger Game novels as well. This feels like my 6th grade class when I was learning how to start and end paragraphs. We don't just start a new line and indent when the paragraph length looks good on the page, we have to finish our idea first.
I am not going to read the next novel in the trilogy, 50 Shades Darker. Not right away, at least. I am going to shift gears into Stienbeck for next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment