Beautiful Bastard: This book is seriously even better than I was expecting it to be (My thoughts on book #1 in the Beautiful series by Christina Lauren)

Before I get too far into discussing my thoughts on Beautiful Bastard, I definitely need to mention that this is actually a book that I’ve wanted to read for several years. The list of reasons for why I’ve wanted to read this book has definitely evolved over the years. I initially wanted to read Beautiful Bastard because I had heard that much like Fifty Shades of Grey, Beautiful Bastard was also originally a Twilight fan fic. Fifty Shades of Grey and Beautiful Bastard’s origins as Twilight fan fiction has definitely led to a lot of people that I’ve encountered online frequently comparing and contrasting the Fifty Shades series and the Beautiful series to each other, which naturally caused me to become interested in both series since I do like the Twilight books.

However, what ultimately served as my motivation to finally read Beautiful Bastard is the fact that I discovered that pretty much everybody who has been a narrator for the audiobook versions of Emma Chase’s books from her Tangled and Legal Briefs series have also served as narrators for various books and short stories from Christina Lauren’s Beautiful series, as well as their Wild Seasons series. I’ve loved all of the narrators for the audiobook versions of Emma Chase’s books, so that has definitely made me want to listen to the audiobook versions of Christina Lauren’s books even more than I already wanted to in the first place; that being said, here are my thoughts on Beautiful Bastard.

For the record, when I started reading Beautiful Bastard, I decided that I wasn’t going to spend the entire time that I was reading the book actively looking for similarities to Twilight and things about the book that might hint at or give away its origins as a Twilight fan fic; even though learning that Beautiful Bastard started out as a Twilight fan fic was one of the first things that got me interested in reading the Beautiful series. Based on what I’ve read of Fifty Shades of Grey so far, there’s no denying that it’s pretty obvious at certain points in the book that it originally started out as a Twilight fan fic. However, when it comes to Beautiful Bastard, there wasn’t really anything about it that I think screams, “Twilight!” Since I haven’t read the original Twilight fan fic version of Beautiful Bastard, which was called “The Office”, I obviously can’t do a comparison of Beautiful Bastard to the fan fic version of the story. That being said, I think that Christina Lauren did a great job of really distancing the story from Twilight and making Beautiful Bastard its own story. Honestly, if I hadn’t known about Beautiful Bastard’s origins as a Twilight fan fic before I started reading it, I’m pretty sure that I never would have guessed or believed that it ever had any connection to Twilight at all.

The Lunar Chronicles: Brace yourselves, Everybody! It’s time to explore the mind and past of Queen Levana (My thoughts on Fairest: Levana’s Story by Marissa Meyer)

Right off the bat, I have to say that while I’ve absolutely loved the Lunar Chronicles so far, Fairest: Levana’s Story is definitely my least favorite book in the series. For the record, I still have to read Winter, so that opinion may change. As I said in my review for Cress, I was really hoping that this book would give Levana some depth and complexity, both as a villain and as a character in general. To be fair, I do think that this book gave Levana some complexity and depth, but unfortunately it didn’t give her too much of those things, which as a result, greatly hindered my enjoyment of Fairest.

The biggest problem that I have with Fairest is the fact that right from the beginning of the book, Levana comes across as being so self-centered, unlikable and evil that it was extremely hard for me to get emotionally invested in Levana as a character and care about her, or get invested in what was happening throughout the book. While the Lunar Chronicles series as a whole has made me think about the TV show Once Upon a Time a lot, as well as the show Grimm, since they’re both shows that involve reimagining fairy tales; Fairest reminded me a lot of the season one episode of Once Upon a Time, “The Stable Boy” where the backstory behind Regina’s hatred for Snow White was revealed. I pretty much had the same problems with this book as I did with that episode of Once Upon a Time. The reveal of what happened to make Regina hate Snow White so much ended up being incredibly disappointing, and it was honestly rather difficult to go along with the idea that Regina was justified in blaming Snow White for the death of Daniel, who was the man that she loved and wanted to marry when it was her mother, Cora, who had actually killed Daniel. While I wasn’t crazy about the explanation as to why Regina hated Snow White so much and wanted to get revenge on her, I was still able to have at least some sympathy for Regina. Plus, I thought that Regina had plenty of depth to her at that point in the series. Levana, on the other hand, lacks depth and is constantly acting so coldhearted, self-centered and flat-out evil throughout the book, that the reader is never really given a chance to feel all that sorry for Levana or truly like her.

I get that Levana’s sister, Channary, was physically and emotionally abusive towards her and is responsible for the scars that she has on her face, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the reader is going to feel sympathetic towards Levana; because the things that Levana does in this book that don’t involve Channary in any way are pretty horrible. I can’t help but wonder if Meyer was trying to portray Levana as a sympathetic villain in this book. However, the thing I think people need to remember is that there’s a big difference between a character having a sympathetic backstory and actually being a sympathetic character. 

Fifty Shades of Grey: If you haven’t already figured out that this book was a originally a Twilight fan fic, this chapter should convince you (My thoughts on Chapter 3)

Let me start off by saying that I’ve really been meaning to get back to doing blog posts on each chapter of Fifty Shades of Grey, but I’ve clearly been putting that off for quite a while since I posted my commentary on chapter two way back in March of 2015. This is due to several reasons. For starters, I don’t want to buy the audiobook version of the book, and it’s really become a challenge for me to discipline myself enough to sit down not just read this book, but any book for that matter. That’s pretty much the whole reason why I’ve really gotten into audiobooks these days. Listening to audiobooks allows me to “read” books while I do jobs around the house, run errands, which also involves me having to ride the city bus and walk a lot since I don’t drive, etc. Plus, I’ve never been a very fast reader to begin with, and listening to audiobooks enables me to “read” books relatively quickly. Anyway, I pretty much spontaneously decided to read chapter three of Fifty Shades of Grey and write a blog post on it since I had the day off from work this past Sunday, which hasn’t happened in quite a while; that being said, here are my thoughts on chapter three of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I was waiting until I read this chapter and was ready to comment on it to discuss the fact that Ana blushes at the drop of a hat. I always thought that it was a really ridiculous quirk for Ana to have. It doesn’t really add anything worthwhile to the story or anything interesting to Ana as a character and the book as a whole. It’s a very well known fact that Fifty Shades of Grey originally started out as a Twilight fan fic, but as I said in my review of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined by Stephenie Meyer, I haven’t read the Twilight series in years; so I didn’t remember anything about it being established that Bella had a tendency to blush a lot. That originally led me to believe that E.L. James had added the whole thing with Ana having the tendency to blush at the drop of a hat in an attempt to “make the character her own” when she decided to take her Twilight fan fic (Master of the Universe) and retool it as the Fifty Shades trilogy. However, after reading Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, which is a gender swap of Twilight, it’s clear to me now that James didn’t add the whole thing about Ana having the tendency to blush a lot when she retooled “Master of the Universe” as Fifty Shades of Grey. I think it’s pretty safe to say that James got the whole idea for Ana’s tendency to constantly blush from Twilight, too. I say this because it turns out that I had forgotten that Bella blushes a lot in Twilight, and Beau, the male equivalent of Bella in Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, blushes quite a bit, too.

The difference between how James handles it in this book versus how Stephenie Meyer handled it in the Twilight books is that James takes it to the absolute extreme. Stephenie Meyer may be a rather mediocre writer, but at least she didn’t overdo it when it comes to how she portrayed Bella/Beau having that particular quirk. When it comes to how E.L. James handles Ana’s tendency to blush at the drop of a hat, it’s just beyond ridiculous and way too over the top. Kate reacts to seeing Ana blush in this chapter in a way that’s absolutely ridiculous, because her reaction makes it seem like Ana blushing is a rare occurrence, rather than being something that she does practically every five seconds. 

Brace yourselves, Everybody! It’s time to talk about Fifty Shades of Midnight Sun (My thoughts on Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian by E.L. James)

I’d like to start out this review by explaining why I decided to read and review E.L. James’ new book Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian in its entirety rather than do a chapter-by-chapter commentary like I’m slowly doing with Fifty Shades of Grey. For starters, after listening to the preview of the audiobook version of Grey on iTunes, I decided that I liked Zachary Webber’s narration of the book enough to buy the audiobook version. I didn’t do that with Fifty Shades of Grey because I don’t like Becca Battoe’s narration of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Another reason why I decided to not do a chapter-by-chapter commentary of this book is because unlike the original Fifty Shades trilogy, this book isn’t broken into chapters in the traditional sense. Instead, each “chapter” is labeled with a date. For example, the first chapter of the book is label, “Monday, May 9. 2011” and all of the “chapters” in the book are pretty long. I didn’t take the time to figure out how long each “chapter” of the book is, but according to a commenter on Jenny Trout’s website, chapter six is eighty pages long.  I’ll discuss my thoughts on the format of the book is different from the format of the original Fifty Shades trilogy and the fact that the chapters in this book are very long later on this review; that being said, here are my thoughts on the book.

I’m going to go right ahead and say that I actually like this book more than the original trilogy, which is something that honestly really surprised me. Don’t get me wrong; E.L. James didn’t magically become a literary genius in the time that’s passed since Fifty Shades Freed was released. This book is still a pile of crap that has a lot of problems, but I do think that compared to the original trilogy, the quality of the writing for this book is at least a little bit better than the original trilogy.

Aside from this book being a shameless cash grab, I’m guessing the reason E.L. James wrote this book is because she wanted to try and convince the people who think that Christian Grey’s an abusive sociopath and that his relationship with Ana is an abusive relationship that they were wrong for thinking that. Unfortunately, I don’t think that she succeeded in convincing people that Christian Grey isn’t the horrible person they think he is. In some ways, Christian comes across even worse than he does in the original trilogy.

That being said, there were times throughout the book where I actually felt that Christian showed hints of being a good person that people could like and feel sympathetic towards him, especially in regards to his traumatic childhood. However, whenever I found myself thinking that perhaps Christian Grey isn’t truly a horrible person like I’ve pretty much always thought that he was, he would quickly go and do, say or think something that would make you feel like you were riding on the Space Mountain rollercoaster ride at hell’s version of Disneyland, and he would be acting like an even bigger asshole than I already thought that he was.