Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy [Paperback]

If I could sum up this reading experience in one sentence it would be: "It's like reading Berenstain Bears with a sadomasochistic twist."
The thing that will turn most readers off isn't her limited vocabulary, it's the repetition of words/phrases that she's confined herself to.

"Holy crap." This is mentioned about 23 in the first three chapters.

"He cocked his head." One time, this is used three times on the same page. If he cocked his head anymore, it would snap off.

"Dios mio!" Her knowledge of other languages is frightful - and overused.

All this mixed with a writing level aimed at young adults made it really hard for me to finish this book. At the start of the novel, she thanks about 5 people who contributed to the book. Did none of them tell her that it was like reading a children's book?

I obtained this book under the advice of someone who just raved about it and told me how it was such a hot seller. After having read through 88% of, I just had to stop and question the sanity of the person who advised me to get this nonsense of a book. To say that this book was disappointing is a gross understatement. I went into this anticipating a nice little steamy/erotic book (the word "porn" was actually used when the book was recommended to me)that I could let myself be absorbed in for a brief time. What I ended up getting was not only an insult to those within the BDSM community but an insult to any adult reader. Many people have commented on how it seems like this novel, nay series, was written by a couple of teenage girls that sat down and decided to write some steamy books. I agree with that sentiment, except I'm not so sure even teenagers would write this badly. All the author seems to do is repeat the same thing over and over again throughout the entire book when it comes to gestures and expressions. I didn't bother doing an actual count, but several other reviewers have actually taken the time to count up how many times the author uses the same exclamations again and again. Still, if it were only this repetitiveness I could almost forgive the author and allow my immagination to pick up where the lack of writing left off.

Unfortunately, the repetitiveness is only the tip of the iceburg here. To be blunt, the characters have absolutely zero depth, and the attempts at depth make absolutely no sense whatsoever. The plot just drags you along kicking and screaming, and not in any kind of a good way. I deffinately got the sense early on that this author A) Looooooooves product placement, which has me wondering just who is signing her checks, and B)Has absolutely no idea how to properly write about the very products she's placing in the story. On what planet is this woman living on where the main character recieves an Apple Macbook Pro laptop that has 1 TERABYTE of hard drive space, 32 GIGABYTES of RAM, and an integrated SIM card/transmitter (that last part isn't actually said but when the delivery guy says she can use the laptop anywhere in the world it's pretty much a given). Add that to all of her references to Blackberry and Audi and you can practically see the company logos plastered all over the front of her book like a NASCAR racer.

I would also love to know where she got her reference material from in regard to the BDSM material. Other than the very basic fact that there is the presence of bondage, domination/submission, and physical punishment in BDSM, this author displayed that she has absolutely no idea how a BDSM relationship/partnership actually functions. The manner in which this author has the male lead "introduce" the female character is insulting to the BDSM community and the level of trust and respect that is actually present in a REAL BDSM relationship/partnership. One thing that truly stands out amongst a whole laundry list of issues that is just too long to go into is when the female character has essentially gone into "sub-space" (a euphoric state brought about by an intense release of endorphines in response to pain) during her first spanking. The author inadequately describes it as simply orgasmic and leaving the girl completely exhausted. What truly bothered me with this scene is that the male character, a supposedly experienced dominant, recognizes that his submissive has just been in "sub-space" and instead of simply holding her, keeping her warm to prevent her from going into shock, and replenishing her fluids, he tosses her onto the bed and has crazy sex with her again. The fact that this author makes the character out to be an experienced Dom and blatantly makes him anything but that is a grave insult to people actually involved in BDSM.

Honestly, I could probably write pages upon pages of material detailing just how badly written and organized this book is, how there is zero character development, how so many different aspects of the characters make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and so very much more. In the interest of saving time and page-space, I will simply make this strong reccomendation to anyone considering purchasing this book:

DON'T!!!!

If I could, I would give this book a rating of zero stars and I would seriously call into question the motivations and competence of everyone who was involved in writing, editing, publishing, and promoting this book to the level it has grown to. If this is indeed what we the public can expect to recieve when a book is touted as being wonderful by the media, then it might be best if we just stuck to the free stuff you can find all over the internet written by actually talented authors who are passed over for publishing to give hack writers like E L James tons of money and publicity for something a sixteen-year-old could have written better.

This was quite possibly the worst thing that I've ever read - and I read a lot.

Besides being repetitive, unbelievable, and possessing characters which are absolutely and extremely annoying, the writing style in general is terrible and the story appears to be a cross between Twilight and something you would read about in the crime section of a newspaper. I didn't even make it past the mid-way point of the book before I was a myriad of emotions including disgusted and appalled that I spent my money on something so ludicrous.

From my limited reading of the story based on the fact that I couldn't even force myself (see what I did there?) to finish it, I would like to suggest that you have some self-respect and leave this one in the bookstore unless someone is paying you a lot of money to careen through repetitive drivel between an abusive stalker and the world's most naive woman. I wish that I could get the last hour of my life back and utilize it to place the trilogy in the garbage and set it on fire.