Changes

|title=Fifty Shades Darker

|author=EL James

|genre=General Fiction

|rating=4.5

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=978-0099579922

|pages=544

|publisher=Arrow

|date=April 2012

|summary=What Christian and Ana did next, this is just as satisfying as the now iconic first book, but with some brilliant extra plot twists outside the bedroom.

}}

Not a lot of time has passed since the [[Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James|first instalment]] of Ana’s adventures with the man she calls Fifty Shades. Perhaps unusually for a follow up it’s not months or years later, in fact just a few days have gone by. Lots of things have changed, though. Successful businessman Christian is still our tortured hero and Ana, now in her first proper job, remains our befuddled heroine but they’re not Christian-and-Ana any more having parted ways at the end of book one. At the same time, a lot has stayed the same. They’re not having quite as much dirty sex as they were but the tensions are still there. He’s still incapable of letting her get on with things without interfering (you’ve got to love a guy who buys the company you work at, just to keep an eye on things). And he still has, let’s say, particular preferences when it comes to his bedroom antics. So, it seems, does Ana. With what were increasingly becoming her regular nocturnal activities now off limits, she’s started craving them. Craving things she didn’t know were possible a month or so ago. Craving things she’s aware nice girls wouldn’t…unless it’s all one big unspoken secret in the sisterhood. Craving things that, let’s be honest, a massive number of readers probably quite fancy themselves after the literary foreplay that was book 1.

While the story moved on, some of the scenarios seemed to repeat themselves too frequently: the fights, the misunderstandings, his fear that she would leave, her reassurances that she wouldn’t. I was surprised she didn’t feel more suffocated by him, because though she expressed her irritation at times, she almost always backed down and agreed to his requests on everything from who was going to drive to whether or not she’d leave the office for lunch. Equally, Ana goes out of her way to provoke him at times. She begs for permission for things she knows he won’t be happy with, when any normal person would just do without asking and perhaps suffer the consequences later. It’s almost like she’s angling for an argument, winding him up as if she wants a punishment, which would be right up Christian’s sexual street after all. The detail entered into was minute and while I didn’t feel it at the time, on reflection it did seem to drag things out a bit when there were other issues that could have made for a more interesting discussion.

Christian may be rich, but Ana’s far from a hooker. [[Callgirl by Jenny Angell]] features one, though, for comparison while [[My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler]] is officially autobiographical which may make you like its kinkiness more or less than a piece of great fiction.

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