My take on Fifty Shades of Grey-An unrelated Mommy Post

Even with the little one in tow I have tried to find some Mommy time at night. Mostly right before bed. Thankfully, Mr. Bradley has decided that he would sleep through the night and he has been going strong, with just a few hiccups, for about 2 months time now. I have been very impressed and feel absolutely blessed!

So in my Mommy time, one of the things I like to do is take a nice hot bath to relax from my stressful day and read a few pages of a book before bed.  In general, the genre I like most I would define as snarky paranormal romance with a sprinkle of romance.  In my youth, I enjoyed books laden with sexy bits, but once you are married for a good number of years and have a child and a household to take care of your tastes change.  What I used to find sexy, intriguing and refreshing has changed tremendously.  Now a clean kitchen sink at the end of the evening is sexy.

At any rate, as a pretty average suburban Mom I tend to watch the Today show most mornings while my little one has his breakfast bottle.  I remember hearing the ladies on Kathie Lee and Hoda talking  about this book that had swept the nation with its popularity.  Apparently, I had been "cave-livin'" cause I had not even heard of it until this point.  At any rate the book was called Fifty Shades of Grey and was on the NY Times Best Seller list for some time.  So, I dutifully called my sister-in-law (a great woman and connoisseur of racy books) only to find she had not read it, nor heard much about it.  By the end of the weekend she had purchased all three books in the trilogy and read through all but 200 pages of the last novel.

Three days later I purchased the book for my Nook reader and began the dark journey through this book.  I think this book is interesting and very sexy, in parts it was a little too sexy.  Not because of the material, but because of the frequency with which it occurs in the novel.  The best parts of the book are the underlying plot and the vocabulary.    I could go on and on about the vocabulary! I have always had a strong battery of $0.25 words and even a smattering of $0.50 words, but the some of the words in this book I have never in my life heard! I do love to learn new things, so this is one aspect that I thoroughly enjoyed about this novel!

As for the sexy bits, they are plentiful and at times quite dark.  At first i was intrigued, but as the pages wore on I had that "oh this again? get on with it" feeling.  However, there was enough of a cliffhanger left at the end of the first book in the trilogy to prompt me to buy the second.  I am currently reading the second book in the trilogy and have to say that I am mildly bored at this point.  I hope that it picks up, but I am a little lost and this may be because I never had sympathy nor empathy for any of the characters in the book.  I am finding now that I have made no real connection to the characters.  This may be the one true failing of this novel.