I'm So Ashamed..................................

My copy of Fifty Shades of Grey arrived this afternoon at 3PM. It is now 12 midnight - 9 measly hours later - and I have just finished the last page of the book. And there were 514 of them. Not a small tome, by any means. I do have to say that I am a fast reader, but still! Amazed even myself. How did I feel about it? Well, aside from the fact that I ripped through it like a hooker through sailors on a dock, I did have a couple niggly problems with it. My grammar snob side was ready to throw it out the window if I read the word 'flush' one more time. She was always flushing, or blushing, or turning crimson. I think she needs her blood pressure checked. I kid you not - in 514 pages, a form of that word appeared at least 400 times. Enough already! Buy a thesaurus! The other word that drove me crazy was 'hitched'. "His breath hitched." Complete overuse of those two words. It was distracting enough to take it from great writing down to a sophomoric effort at best. What saved it was the story line. Yes, I got dragged into it enough to overlook the writing. There were story twists that weren't entirely expected - I (obviously) was kept wanting to see what would happen next. Thankfully, it never really veered off into the realm of the standard bodice-ripper romance novel (gag). Could be because of the subject matter - LOL! But now that I've brought that up, I have to say, the actual BDSM activity in it was rather tame. Mostly talk and not a whole lot of action. When he first started telling her what he was in to, I was almost ready to put the book down. It all sounded a little too intense and violent for me. His 'playroom' where he carried out his fantasies was made to sound like the the deepest, darkest hole of erotic depravity. But it never traveled to that point. In fact, I was getting a little annoyed with the few discipline scenes that were described and his lack of command over her - he promised a lot more than he delivered. "Oh come on - you call that a spanking, you wuss?" Her reaction to 18 whacks on the backside with his hand was a bit over the top. And then at the end, he finally gives her six good ones with a belt, and suddenly she is the wuss, and leaves him! What the f...!? Ok, that was a dirty trick. Now I am going to have to buy the second book to see if she mans up and goes back to him. I'm hoping for a bit more action in the next one, if little Miss Priss can take it. So yes, I hated the ending, if only for the fact that it makes me want to read the next one. Maybe that was a better twist at the end than what I give the writer credit for? Yeah, yeah - I get it. One thing is for sure - I'm not siding with our female protagonist in this one. I am much more sympathetic to our male antagonist - I want to see him prevail and bring her around to his way of thinking! I'm off to Amazon to make a purchase.