Review - Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James

Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Paperback, 532 pages

Published April 17th 2012 by Vintage (first published January 1st 2011)

Source: Own copy

Synopsis:
'Daunted by the singular tastes and dark secrets of the beautiful, tormented young entrepreneur Christian Grey, Anastasia Steele has broken off their relationship to start a new career with a Seattle publishing house.

But desire for Christian still dominates her every waking thought, and when he proposes a new arrangement, Anastasia cannot resist. They rekindle their searing sensual affair, and Anastasia learns more about the harrowing past of her damaged, driven and demanding Fifty Shades.

While Christian wrestles with his inner demons, Anastasia must confront the anger and envy of the women who came before her, and make the most important decision of her life.'

My Thoughts:
So ok, for some reason it has taken me a while to get up the energy to finally review this book. For some reason it just didn't grab my attention like the first one did and kind of left me a little disappointed and, dare I say it, bored in some parts.

This instalment starts off with the aftermath of the break up of Anastasia and Christian. Anastasia is an absolute mess and still thinks of Christian practically every minute of her waking hours.

After a little while apart, Christian re-enters Ana's life with a new proposition. He wants to offer her a chance at the type of relationship she really wants and promises to give 'vanilla' a wholehearted attempt.

The main theme of this book centres around the opening up of Christian and the discovery of what has shaped him to be the person he is and why he has developed his dominant/submissive persona.

Ana is a much stronger and verbal person in this book but still grates on my nerves a little with the constant repetition of certain phrases and how she has a tendency to say way too much in her head instead of out loud. I found myself screaming at her sometimes to just 'Speak up!' rather than mumble to herself and this frustrated me quite a bit.

This book still centres around a massive amount of sex between Christian and Ana and by the end I was sick of reading about the sex scenes to tell the truth. I am definitely no prude and have an open mind about practically anything but I really did want more actual storyline and character development and less sex and found myself starting to skim over certain scenes. I felt like the poor girl just needed to be given a rest now and then.
Overall this book is a bit like the more mature sister to Fifty Shades of Grey as it has a much slower pace and doesn't contain as many jaw dropping scenes.

I was left intrigued by the ending of this one as there is a bit of a twist which I didn't see coming so I am interested to see how the story is developed in the final instalment.
Links:
Review - Fifty Shades of Grey (Book 1)
Amazon
The Book Depository