A freshly dog-eared review
The Book That Made Everyone Lie About Reading It
I read this book on a Kindle with the brightness turned down to almost nothing, on a red-eye flight, because I did not want the guy next to me to see the cover. That’s the whole cultural moment of Fifty Shades of Grey in one sentence: everyone read it, almost nobody wanted to be seen reading it, and somehow that combination sold more copies than most literary fiction sells in a decade. I have complicated feelings about this book. I think it’s badly written. I also think I read all three in about a week and a half, so take my complaints with the appropriate grain of salt.
| Author | E.L. James |
| Published | 2011 |
| Genre | Erotic Romance |
| Format | Series, first of a trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey, Darker, Freed) |
| Reception | Massive commercial phenomenon, widely mocked for its prose, genuinely controversial for its portrayal of consent and control |
| Our rating | 2.7/5 |
| Read it if | you want to understand the book everyone was talking about, or you enjoy messy, obsessive, doesn’t-pretend-to-be-classy romance |
| Skip it if | bad prose actively ruins a reading experience for you, or you need your billionaire love interests to not also be red flags |
A literature student, a red room, and a spreadsheet of NDAs
Anastasia Steele is a senior in college who has, somehow, never used the internet or owned a computer, which is the first of many things in this book you just have to accept and move past. She interviews Christian Grey, a twenty-seven-year-old billionaire, for her roommate’s college newspaper, trips over a doormat walking into his office, and that’s it, she’s done for. Christian is controlling in a way the book frames as intense and romantic: he tracks her phone, shows up uninvited, buys the company she works for. He also has a Red Room of Pain, a contract full of clauses about diet and exercise and who owns her body on which days, and a backstory involving his adoptive mother and an older woman named Mrs. Robinson that the book gestures at but never really digs into with any psychological seriousness.
Here’s the thing, though: as a hook, it works. You know within the first fifty pages exactly what kind of book you’re reading and exactly what you’re going to get, and the book delivers on that promise relentlessly. There’s no bait and switch. You signed up for a billionaire dom and a virgin ingenue and that’s what you get, chapter after chapter, contract negotiation after contract negotiation.
The parts that work, the parts that made me put the Kindle face down on the tray table
Let me be honest about the writing, because a lot of reviews dance around it. The prose is rough. Ana’s internal monologue leans on “my inner goddess” doing gymnastic routines and her subconscious literally scolding her like a separate character living in her skull, and by book two of that device I wanted to reach into the page and confiscate it. The dialogue repeats itself. Christian says “laters, baby” and it’s supposed to be charming and it just isn’t. There are entire pages of email exchanges between Ana and Christian that read like they were dashed off in a single sitting and never touched again.
And yet. The propulsion of this book is real. James, whatever her sentence-level flaws, understood pacing on a gut level that plenty of more polished writers never crack. Every chapter ends on a hook. The will-she-sign-the-contract tension is stretched out with genuine skill, even if the prose delivering it is clunky. I remember hitting the scene where Ana finally sees the playroom for the first time, and even though I could feel every awkward word choice, I could not stop turning pages. That’s a strange, specific talent, and I don’t think it should get waved away just because the writing itself is embarrassing in places.
My real criticism isn’t the prose, though. It’s that the book conflates control with love in a way that never gets interrogated. Christian’s stalking, his need to know where Ana is at all times, his anger when she disobeys him outside of any negotiated scene, all of that gets narratively rewarded rather than examined. The BDSM community was famously vocal about this when the book came out, pointing out that actual kink culture is built on negotiated consent and aftercare, and this book treats those things as an afterthought to a possessive romance plot. I went in expecting a kinky book. I came out thinking it was less about kink and more about a woman falling for a man who is genuinely alarming, dressed up in silk ties.
A tangent, because I can’t help it: I read somewhere that this started as Twilight fan fiction, and once you know that, you cannot unsee it. The way Christian looms over Ana, the way she’s clumsy and wide eyed and constantly overwhelmed by how beautiful and rich and dangerous he is, it’s Edward and Bella with the metaphorical vampirism swapped out for a literal contract. That origin explains a lot about both the appeal and the limitations.
If you want to see what people are still saying about it, the reviews on Amazon are its own genre of entertainment, thousands of them, wildly split between five stars and one.
This isn’t really a book about kink. It’s a book about a woman convincing herself that being controlled is the same thing as being loved.
About E.L. James
E.L. James is the pen name of Erika Mitchell, a British former television executive who wrote the original draft of this story as Twilight fan fiction under the title Master of the Universe, posted it online, then filed the serial numbers off and sold it as original fiction. She had never published a novel before this. Within a couple of years she went from anonymous fanfic writer to one of the best selling authors alive, got a movie trilogy made, and became a punchline and a phenomenon simultaneously, which is about as strange a career arc as publishing has ever produced. She’s since written the trilogy again from Christian’s point of view and branched into other romance projects, but nothing has touched the cultural footprint of this one.
If this made you curious (or made you furious), read these next
A few places to go from here, depending on which direction you want to lean.
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, for the source material this was born from, minus the contracts.
- The Bared trilogy or Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, for a version of the billionaire dom plot with tighter prose and a heroine who pushes back harder.
- Story of O by Pauline Reage, if you want to see where the literary tradition of submission narratives actually started, decades before this book and far more unsettling.
- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, if what you actually wanted was steamy and emotionally intelligent rather than steamy and possessive.
For your book club
- Does the book ever actually examine Christian’s controlling behavior, or does it consistently frame it as romantic no matter what he does?
- Ana is repeatedly described as inexperienced and unworldly. Why do you think the book needed her to start from such a blank slate?
- How does knowing this started as Twilight fan fiction change (or not change) how you read the central relationship?
- Is the contract negotiation the most interesting part of the book, and if so, what does that say about where the real tension lives?
- Did the cultural conversation around this book, the movies, the memes, the think pieces, change how you were able to read it on the page?
Still thinking about it
Whatever you land on with this one, love it, hate it, can’t stop rereading the playroom scene, it’s a book that’s impossible to have a neutral opinion on, and that’s rare enough to matter. If you want more takes like this, unfiltered and opinionated, check out more of our book reviews and see what else we can’t shut up about.