Fifty Shades of Grey

Released: 2012
Author: E L James
Pages: 528 pages
IF there was a rating system for books this would be: X

Rundown: Ana is a virgin and about to graduate college.  Christian is a role playing Dominate who is also a young CEO of his own company, but he likes sex a lot and he likes to beat women to really get turned on.  Oh and he's so controlling, and creepy.

Well, I had heard a lot of things about this book: that it was for adults only, that it was like Twilight for adults, that it had a lot of sex, NY Times Best Seller, women were going crazy over it.  Well, I suppose if you've never had sex you'd go crazy over it, and if you didn't know what a good book or a good romance novel was supposed to be like, you might go crazy over it as well.

This was the first novel for the author so I will cut her some slack, but the copy editor should have helped her with some grammar problems, and her editor should have helped with some other plot issues, and continuity issues, and lack of character development issues, and issues of repetition, and taken out some of the sex because it's really there a lot of times just for sex's sake.

I'm writing my own romance novel right now so I'm really in tune with what should be working and what isn't.
Unfortunately, this book is full of repetition from how the male lead is described over and over again as hot, sexy, beautiful, etc, to how often the characters have sex for no other reason then to write another sex scene into the book and hope the audience is distracted from the book's other problems.

Yes, the book gets ridiculous from time to time, and the male lead seems to be physically perfect, but is an arrogant controlling, obsessive, aggressive, and dangerous asshole, but since he's beautiful, it's ok with the female lead that he scares her.
This book had actually made me stop reading at one point because I got physically ill with some of the control issues with bondage and such.

I usually enjoy when the main characters have sex, but halfway through, there was so much of it, I started just glossing over those scenes looking for character development.

Trust me, you're not missing anything by skipping this one.  In fact, I'm not even going to bother reading the next two, even though #1 left me on a cliffhanger.  I really don't care what happens next.  So glad I didn't pay full price for this book!

1 out of 5 for some laughs, intentional and otherwise, and a couple good sex scenes.
SKIP IT!