A Writer’s Review of the Fifty Shades of Gray Trilogy by EL James

Since this is a three-in-one review, it is a bit longer than usual, but since I know many of you are as curious about these books as I am, I thought no one would care.

Flashplot: Readers of the Twilightseries will see many similarities in the plot and characters of these novels from Fifty shadesIt was originally written as a fan fiction for the Meyer series. However, although James closely follows certain Twilight aspects, the trilogy finally tells its own story of forbidden love between a deeply flawed young man and a shy young woman who is forced to do her thing to save her love and lover.

That is the story in a nutshell. Actually. Okay, so the ‘forbidden’ part stems not from Christian being a brilliant deer-eating vampire, but a Dom who shakes his palms with a love of BDSM and unlike Bella, Ana doesn’t face to the decision to renounce his humanity. but rather to embrace her sexuality in all its wicked glory. Other than that, however, it is a typical Romeo and Juliet tale.

As a reader: Like many women, I picked up the first book out of curiosity. I wanted to see if Fifty shadesIt was really worth the hype. Unlike some soccer moms, I had read romance / erotica books before, so I didn’t expect the sex scenes to surprise or annoy me. In general, it was not. JR Ward had explored the BDSM angle years ago on her. Black Dagger BrotherhoodSerie. So it all came down to whether the characters and plot could pull me in with or without the sex scenes (preferably with). Although the faulty writing, especially in the beginning, was distracting, the answer was yes. As in the Twilightseries, I loved watching the heroine, Ana Steele, go from being shy to tenacious. These books allow women to remember our first loves and feel ashamed of our struggles to go from shy teenagers to confident young women. I was equally delighted to see Christian Gray, Ana’s love interest, go from being a wealthy and domineering sex god to a broken but healing and lovable human being. The initial fantasy of finding a rich, handsome, and dangerous lover is fun, but realizing that most of the time it is nothing more than a fantasy is comforting and more realistic.

As someone who enjoyed the Twilight series, I was a bit disappointed at first by the amount of similarities between the main characters and the plots. However, as he read more in the books, James began to entertain more and more from fan fiction until what he ultimately created was his own story, a bit cliché, but still funny on its own merits. Some of my favorite parts of the books were when James was having fun with his own humor and creativity, mainly the subject lines of the emails sent between Ana and Christian, which were always funny or dazzling.

So even though the sex was great, in the end it was the characters with thousands of heartbreaking backstories and those bits of creativity and humor that sucked me in and kept me awake until all hours of the night.

As a writer: I’m not sure if books like these should make me feel better or worse about my own writing. I felt very good reading the opening chapter of the first book and acknowledging that I was in serious need of revision. It’s comforting to know that other new writers struggle to get their stories out the door. It becomes clear as one reads further in the book that James was still finding the voices of his characters in those opening chapters. Although the first-person narrative felt stiff and the dialogue sounded forced in those early chapters, James got into a relatively quick pace. Soon, Ana sounded like a twenty-two-year-old realist, both in her thoughts and in her dialogues. Her internal monologues often sounded sadly and hilariously like those of a twenty-two-year-old in the throes of love and life.

There were also other flaws, such as overused words and phrases, that began to stand out as the series progressed. The development of the plot was also unstable, but this I understood as a writer. James was trying to balance the plot surrounding his characters’ personal journeys with external plots. If the two plots are not closely linked to each other, as James’s were not, one may climax at a strange moment within the book arc.

So why would all these flaws make me feel worse as a writer? Well, because my own books share a lot of them, but they’re not likely to go viral like Fifty shadesanytime.

Bottom line: If you are an adult who liked the Twilight series and you are comfortable with some non-traditional sex scenes, you are likely to get sucked into this series, so go ahead and buy the entire trilogy. You’ll save some cash, and trust me, you won’t want to stop reading long enough to drive to the nearest store.