Fifty Shades Darker (50 Shades Trilogy, #2)

by E L James

[booksandcats]

I wasn't really a fan of the first book, but since I started the series I wanted to finish it as well, so here we go.

Again, it isn't bad by any account, if you take it as "just" erotic romance, and nothing really literary impressive. The chemistry is good, the sex scenes are hot, although at this point often a bit repetitive. I seriously believe that the author could have taken a scene from the first book and just copy pasted it into the second one and nobody would have noticed. Not that I've checked. But still, if you read it for the hot and steamy reason, it delivers on that part.

Same as the first, several issues:

Again, repetitive language. How often can you "breathe" a word or a sentence?! It's really just getting ridiculous at this point. And I don't think I've read this expression before this series. Ever. But yeah, I mean there are other words to describe communicating with each other. To see the good side of this point, it motivated me to pay extra attention to how other authors create communication between Characters without repeating the same expressions over and over again. So that's something I guess.

The characters, especially Ana get annoying a bit, cause it feels like the author is just dragging the relationship drama unnecessarily out, to create more, when it feels unnatural. I mean, they resolve most of their problems pretty much at the beginning, and then (until the final conflict), the problem is mainly that Ana can't trust Christian, not because of anything he did or said, but because for no reason whatsoever she has huge self-confidence issues. Which was annoying. Because, for Christian they explain why his past has lead to his self-doubt, and why he believes himself to be unworthy and therefor doubts that Ana will stay. Ana however had a pretty happy Childhood, had no huge issues, but has almost bigger problems trusting Christian. And to be honest, that get's old real quick when Christian hasn't given her any real reason to doubt him. Again, I get why she has problems with the relationship, his past, his earlier lifestyle and all, that's more than reasonable to look at that and see problems for the future. But it is stated several times that that's not Ana's real problem, but wether she would be enough.

So, it's not bad as an erotica I guess, my main problem (aside from the quality of writing) is that it feels like it tries to be more than it is. And don't get me wrong, a relationship with an mc with that past, the meeting and everything, just the backbone of the story could potentially be really interesting and prove to be and excellent, very deep Romance. But not like this, not when the idea behind the series seems to be to focus mainly on sex (which is totally fine by itself). But it just turns out like a weird mix, an erotic novel that tries to have a deep, meaningful storyline and fails. Which is disappointing, cause the erotic part isn't that bad.