This evening I decided to start a blog here on Goodreads, after wandering around the virtual bookshelves enjoying myself immensely. But what to write? After some thought, I decided to post a piece I wrote a short while ago which seemed to garner interest and publish it here :-) Hope readers enjoy it.


FIFTY SHADES OF GREY VERSUS THE HUNGER GAMES - NO CONTEST

Like most authors I read voraciously across all genres. Though I’m not given to writing book reviews, I’ve recently read two phenomenally successful trilogies and just couldn’t help but pass comment. I was left shaking my head in surprise at both, for different reasons. Any hugely successful book or series always seems to provoke polarised reactions and lots of talk. Somehow I was able to avoid the mega-hype about both the Fifty Shades trilogy and The Hunger Games – released back in 2008 – for quite a while. Surprising, but true. Then I got stuck in and read them both, one after the other.
Why include these series together in a review? Well... because whilst they targeted totally different markets and were totally different genres, and had basically nothing in common story-wise, they did have some similar points.
The put their authors on the map, globally.
Both made their authors a ridiculous amount of money – every writer’s dream.
Both have mass appeal across the target market.
One has been made into a movie and the other will be.
Both got people talking and have already been the subject of many, many reviews – thus probably making anything I’ve got to say irrelevant. Ha ha, that’s not unusual anyway.

I must say that before I read E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey I was secretly amused by some of those around me who’d done so and were talking about the trilogy. All were women (men appear to be too embarrassed to own up to reading it) and the age range surprised me. Let’s face it, this book contains a lot of sex. A lot of BDSM and some very explicit stuff. To find an elderly neighbour saying how much she enjoyed it made me raise my eyebrows. Was it that good? Really? I was given the first novel to read and duly got stuck in. Did I find it as shocking as some of my friends said it was? Nup. I’m pretty broad-minded I suppose but really – and I’m not trying to be disrespectful to the author here but this is just the way I found it – the phrase ‘Mills and Boon on steroids’ sprung to mind.
On a more serious note, I just didn’t like the way the characters were portrayed. The central female character , Anastasia Steele, seemed ten years younger emotionally than she should have been. So many times I felt like yelling at the book, ‘Kick his stalking, masochistic, bullying ass out of it, girl!’ Weak. She was portrayed as incredibly weak and powerless, rather than the naive I hope the author was aiming for. And she learnt nothing as the story progressed, which was even worse.
Call me weird but I found the odious Mr Grey, well, odious. Rich as Croesus, James Bond without the charm and sex appeal – and with a nasty little personality disorder that saw him get his kicks out of dominating and beating up a girl who had no idea of what BDSM was about, initially. That’s how he struck me. His redeeming features weren’t even close to redeeming. He was just nasty.

The portrayal of not just women, but two partners of any sex in a relationship was just all bloody wrong in my opinion. Away from novels in the ‘real world’ I couldn’t care less what the sexual preferences of consenting adults are but the relationships in this book just sucked as far as I’m concerned and I found it annoying to read.
Yet... yet... though the book has its naysayers, me included, it is now the best-selling novel of all time so obviously plenty of readers didn’t feel this way. Or did they? Could it be that the book sold so well because readers were curious about the kinky sex scenes? Because it was so clearly divorced from reality? Because the ‘hero’ of the series seems to be able to do anything and has loads of money? Or did the book, and the series, have more substance than that and I was missing something. I went out and bought Book Two, to see. Fifty Shades Darker. It was ten bucks at K-Mart. Like I said, I’m no prude but I don’t think it’s a very good idea to have all three novels in this series sitting slap bang on a big Point of Sale display right next to the self-serve checkouts. Really, they’d be a very bad sex education book for young kids. Truly. They shouldn’t be there. Just my opinion but I don’t think... well... you’d have to read the books to see why it’s not such a good idea.
And boost sales just that little bit more.
Hmmm.
Book Two was awful. Fifty shades more boring. Sorry but it just was. I almost didn’t finish it. Again, no disrespect but it seemed to me that the author had an idea that sold well and hit the market somehow just at the right place and time to make Book One the amazing hit it was. But in Book Two what little that could have been developed in the story was lost. The author just didn’t seem to have the skill to keep the reader interested with something other than sex and the original story ideas from the first novel. The writing was poor and the two dimensional characters went nowhere. Mr Grey was even less likeable than in the first novel, as the author tried to give him some redeeming qualities. There was nowhere to go with the tired XXX sex scenes. The story inched along with the odd attempt at a plot twist here and there that didn’t really inspire me. And on this one, others felt the same from comments I’d heard, again from friends.
I have to admit, I can’t review Book Three because I so completely lost interest. Who cares what happens, basically.
I was disheartened. As an author, is this stuff what the public truly wants to read? Apparently so.

Sigh.

I moved on to the next hit series, this one clearly aimed at Young Adults.
Thank God for The Hunger Games, I say!
I have a wonderful friend who is a secondary school teacher and a very gifted academic. She’s no slouch with the pen herself and is very politically minded. Apart from her teaching degree she’s done an Honours year in Political Science and is halfway through a PhD – the subject matter being nuclear disarmament during the George Bush Senior era. She’s very politically-minded to say the least.
My friend raved about The Hunger Games. Said she could not put the books down, pressed the first one on me and urged me to read it so we could discuss it. ‘You’ll love these books,’ she said.
Now I must admit to owning up to wondering at first if she’d spent a bit too much time around her kids at school. Really? That good? Well John Marsden’s Tomorrow series sure was. So I began to read.
And read.
And read.
She was right! How had this series passed me by up until now? Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian society in North America, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen is a strong and complex character that is eminently believable. Within pages I found myself holding my breath for her and her friends and family. The idea behind this first book this time made me think, ‘Survivor on steroids’. Brilliant. But not by any means as simple as a game of individual survival. As the trilogy progressed, it simply got better. Blossomed, became more multi-faceted in its thought-provoking ideas on politics, power struggles, wars and revolution. The clever thing is, it did it without becoming bogged down and slow reading for Young Adults. In this trilogy, friends become enemies, enemies become friends and good guys have bad sides that make you wince as you read, because they are so realistic. Relationships are complex and realistic for the age group, too.
I also felt the author’s writing style was quite masterful. Short, sharp sentences, popular first person narrative, present tense. Done so well that it was never formulaic or too simplistic for regular adults to enjoy. And it grew better and better with each novel.
For instance:
‘I’m not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it criss-crossed with cracks. One good jolt of a bunker missile and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.’
This describing the heroine’s emotional disintegration under the pressure of dirty tricks from the opposing side in a war, as she is the face of a rebellion and they work to break her by torturing her friends.
Compare this with the heroine of Fifty Shades, Anastasia Steele’s boringly repetitive ‘inner goddess ’ rubbish and there quite simply is no comparison.
Is Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy, the Huxley and Orwell for Young Adults of our times? Maybe. I certainly agree with my friend when she says the books should be on Year 10 reading lists, rather than Orwell’s Animal Farm, which apparently was hard for some of her students to understand. For me, The Hunger Games is highly recommended reading for Young Adults and Adults alike. The ending to the trilogy is just too good to give away, if you don’t already know it...
I haven’t seen The Hunger Games movie and don’t think I’ll bother as from all accounts it’s not as good as the book.
As I said at the start of this article, I was left shaking my head in surprise at these two mega-hit trilogies. With Fifty Shades, it was in disbelief that such literary pap could be so successful. There are far better authors of erotic fiction than E.L. James. With The Hunger Games, I was shaking my head in admiration of Suzanne Collins.
Wish I could write like that!
Heather Hammonds