Fifty Shades Trilogy: Fifty Shades Darker – Manual Examine (EL James)
Immediately after the torture read that was Fifty Shades of Grey (my review), I braced myself for the 2nd book. A sane person would have stopped reading but being the masochist that I am, I need to know if these books, which are still selling like hotcakes, actually had anything more to that than the sex scenes upon sex scenes which filled their pages, ultimately getting to be useless and skippable.
The second buy in the Fifty Shades trilogy, titled Fifty Shades Darker, doesn’t stray away much from its predecessor. But as the title suggests, it runs deeper directly into what the first book lacked: a tangible story.
Fifty Shades Darker picks up where Grey left off: Ana had left Christian after he beat her in one of his sexual escapades. She then starts to sink in to despair, as is typical for similar characters in other books (Yes, Twilight comes to mind). Luckily enough, the doesn’t last a whole book. A few pages later Ana encounters Christian and ends up in his arms again without much struggle. This time, however, their own relationship won’t be the same. New boundaries need to be set and new rules need to be instilled. As the story progresses, Ana starts to become fearful about the prospect of Christian leaving her for somebody else when he gets bored of her and the “vanilla” romance they have. On the other hand, Christian finds in Ana a reason for living (the billions upon billions that he has are not enough) and is equally fearful about her leaving him.
As their “relationship” grows, one of Christian’s ex-subs who had never lost her fixation in him returns with a vengeance while Ana faces trouble at the publishing house she’s working at with her overly flirtatious boss.
That’s book pair in a nutshell.
Is it better versus book one? Only slightly. Fifty shades darker free pdf delves deeper and goes darker into what made Christian the sadist BDSM-loving person that he is but those insights into the character’s personality are so diluted by the overly abundant sex setting that they eventually become irrelevant.
Ana is still as useless a character as she was in book one. Even the “improvement” to her relationship with Christian don’t rub off on her – no pun intended – to give her some spine. In fact, she even melts further into the man she’s in appreciation with, becoming more and more useless with each passing page. She “flushes” at every turn of the page. Her infamous “oh my” is blurted out plenty of times. Her Macbook Pro is still called the “mean machine.” Everything about her is still the same – except much staler and when her being as stale as it can easily get in Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s saying something.
If you’re the person reading Fifty Shades for the intercourse scenes (I’m not judging), you won’t be disappointed. As I said, Fifty Shades Darker doesn’t run short on them. Among the places that get a taste of Ana and Christian’s undying libido there’s a pool table, an elevator, his or her corresponding apartments and a boat’s deck, just to name a few.
Fifty Shades Darker manages to go a few shades deeper when compared to its predecessor but that’s nowhere near enough to turn this erotic “thing” a novel worth reading. The characters still use the same cues for sex. Whatever plot just that takes place is as predictable as it can get and that’s without even supposed into the overly repetitive writing style which gets even worse on this.
Why did I read these? Yes, I read all three e-books a few months ago. Well, horrible as they are, they were still better than the medical school material I had to study.
