Tom Gardner

The only book to date I couldn't get through. Weak plot, repetitive dialogue, poorly written characters. Anastasia Steele is plain irritating, naive and self-absorbed. While Christian Gray is an absurd character. An impossibly sexy and enticingly mysterious young billionaire, helicopter pilot, concert pianist, among other such nonsense. From the get go they're barely speaking with one another, always whispering and murmuring. Add to this a strenuously contrived and tediously predictable exchange, lacklustre imagination of what constitutes kinky sex, against a backdrop of two fundamentally unlikable characters fumbling their way into a dysfunctional relationship, and you have a recipe for an awful novel. I almost got through it, but in the end it was just too terrible. I abandoned it a good 30 pages before the end. So bear in mind for all I know it could have had an amazing ending, making sense of all of it. Though I have my doubts.