now that i’ve found myself back into the romance/’erotic’ (gasp) genre, i felt the need to revisit 50 Shades of Grey. I’m proud to admit that i read it before it was even talked about to the extreme levels that it is now.  i came across it when it was first published all those months ago, and i actually told my book reading friends about it just as the hype was starting to build.  Ironically, when i was reading it the first time around, i got the heavy sex context of it, but i picked up a lot more on the actual story and found myself drawn to that more so than the graphic quality.

in my second pass at reading it, i really delved more into that, and was actually impressed with things that i remembered and little details that i didn’t.  if you take out maybe 50% of the sex, you still have that element of the story, but you have a really good plot.  there are a few things though that i think about a lot of time that i wonder if we would ever get those things answered (assuming that E.L. James decided that maybe after writing the stories from Christian’s perspective that she’ll do additional stories).

1) Mia / Ethan – what’s the deal there?  did they enjoy that first lunch?  were they just thrown together every time after that because of Christian and Kate’s tie to the relationships?  Did Ethan like Mia?  we know she liked him

2) secondary characters – i think that there could be some great plot lines developed over a few of these guys.  maybe we can get a story about Kate/Elliot going?  since they are quite major/minor characters – i think that there’s at least one book there.  what about Taylor?  What about Ros? or Elena?

3) what’s the tie from Jack Hyde and Mr. Lincoln?  why did he post bail?  was it really just jealous?  was that the motivation there and that he wanted to get revenge from Christian having the ‘affair’ with Elena?  I feel like there’s more for some reason.

Lastly, in reading about the development of the movie and how they are still in talks about how this can be made into a PG/PG-13 movie vs. an R – i definitely see how it can be done.  i think that there’s much more of a story there than people want to think about and yes there’s sex, but that’s not what it’s really about.  it’s just a piece of it.

we’ll have to wait and see – but what i DO know is that after reading those post chapters of Fifty Shades Freed – i kind of feel like the christian POV stories will be great.