50 Shades of Grey

  Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades Trilogy #1) = 50 Shades of Awful! Where to begin with this book...

I first heard about it on the Today show. As Hermione Granger said: the best way to get people to read something is to ban it.  [Older Sister says: several libraries in FL have actually refused to carry the book or have removed it from their collections after seeing it reviewed.] I haven't been able to force myself to actually finish this book, so this review may be unfair, but when I started reading it I was struck by how ridiculously similar it was to Twilight.  [Older Sister here again: this book started as Twilight fanfiction. If you don't know what fanfiction is, you're mostly lucky.]

A klutsy pale girl living in the Pacific Northwest has never had a boyfriend but mysteriously has plenty of amorous would-be suitors. She works in a sporting goods store. Her ethnic male best friend is obsessed with her, and he is also her mechanic. Her mother is flighty and careless while her stepfather is monosyllabic and stiff. She loves to read books and write but not actually participate in life. She finds it hard to eat around the man she desires while he is weirdly obsessed with food. She has an old crappy car and her "boyfriend" insists on buying her a new one, as well as many other lavish gifts that she is uncomfortable accepting. She finds that his BREATH smells enticing (seriously). He warns her to stay away from him, he is trouble, he is no good for her.

The "best" part: he inducts her into a messed up and seriously abusive relationship.  I didn't mind the Twilight books until my 12-year-old students became obsessed with them and talked about how they wanted a boyfriend just like Edward.  I used to tell them, "having a boy stalk you, kidnap you, boss you around, tell you what to eat, wear, drive, who to be friends with...That is not love and it is NOT healthy."

I now have several friends who adore these 50 Shades of Grey books and I just want to have them committed.  All I could think about when reading this book was, "what the hell happened to him to leave him so damaged?"  He's psychologically ill, the type of person that makes you shudder when they are up on the witness stand, confessing to their heinous crimes.  You run in the opposite direction.  You do not stick around to be strung up on their ceiling.  And if that sounds like fun to you...you either have a latent desire to become a social worker and it's manifesting itself as an interest in traumatized and psychologically deviant behavior, or there is something seriously wrong with you too.

Also, the writing is terrible.