Review: 50 Shades of Frustration, and Who is Leigh?
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 09 15, 2013
There are things I can forgive in a novel, particularly one that is low on price. However, in this novel there were too many of my worst pet peeves gone too far for me to overlook them. While the story held good promise, the writing and editing were so poorly done that it detracted from the story almost to the point of making it a humorous farce rather than a good, steamy story.I know that nobody is perfect, but this book seriously needed some basic proofreading and some editing by a real-live person who could give the author an honest opinion on the amount of "suspension of disbelief" required to accept this too-unrealistic-to-be-accepted story. is difficult to notice the story and its merit with a rampant list of grammatical sins.To name a few: tense shifts, character confusion (often, in conversations where the actual main character is referenced by a different name she is called by a her best friend's name or worse. in one particular instance Scarlet is speaking and calls her best friend by her own name (calling her Scarlet instead of Janie), and at least four times by my count Scarlet is referred to by the name "Leigh"), chronological issues, redundancy, inattention to detail consistency (Scarlet has a truck and then a car without explanation as to how her vehicle changed), noins incorrectly possessive or plural possessive, and a marked and rampant disregard for common punctuation and word choices that continued to be wrong over and over so that they were obviously not a typo (you and you're, to and too and were and we're are none of them interchangeable). At one point I began wishing for a working copy so I could mark the text to be corrected.On a more personal side, I had many complaints with the story itself. For one, it was like a copying of 50 Shades of Grey (including the wealthy BDSM male lead, the virginal college graduate, and the poor writing issues). For another the main characters' names-Scarlet and Rhett-a bit too corny for me not to laugh, would have been enough without the redundant repetition of Scarlet's favorite movie being, "Gone with the Wind"-why not her favorite book, too? But my main complaint was the absolute and total misunderstanding of the BDSM relationship dynamic within the main characters. And the continually unrealistic emotional behavior of the main characters chafed me a bit after the third description. The exorbitant, exaggerated reactions to things and a complete 180 degree turn with little reasoning or provocation in the next paragraph made me groan in frustration and actually remark aloud to myself at the ridiculous and unbelievable quality of the characters as they were written.The story would have done better if the writer had sunk half of her descriptions and used real-human reactions rather than histrionic levels of adjectives to show what a basket case Scarlet is rather than a healthy, well-adjusted individual as she was claimed to be in the third person narrative. If I had actually know this character, I'd have had her committed after her first fetal position crying jag after being with Rhett-because she was so in love??? Nope, not buying it as anything but psychotic obsession.I cannot in good conscience recommend this book without a serious re-write or some major editing (to say the least).