The only reason I finished the book was because I hate loose ends. About a quarter into this book I started thinking about skipping to the last few chapters. The bad writing, the constant repeating and the unlikely ideas, was almost more than I could take. The author does reward the reader for being patient and putting up with all the flaws by wrapping everything up in a nice bow and gives the readers closure.

As stated before, this book repeats a lot. The pattern is the same almost every time: an argument or ten pages of “I love you, I love you too”, followed by sex. Then comes an arguement or lots of “I love you, I love you too” followed by more sex. They have sex almost constantly. At least a third of the book is poorly written sex scenes. It isn’t the poorly written sex of the other two books, it is worse. I don’t know why the author stopped putting as much work into the sex. Maybe she lost interest in the sex, maybe she just couldn’t come up with different stuff. It had fewer details and fewer new ideas as the book goes on.

The book does have a mystery, and other dramatic events happening too, probably with the idea of keeping the plot interesting. The mystery didn’t capture my interest, I knew there was something going on, but the author gives so little details that there is no way to guess what could be going on. Christian doesn’t share any more information than he has to with Ana, leaving her in the dark as much as possible. And because the book is written in first person the reader only has the information that Ana has. When the mystery isn’t happening, the author has other dramatic events completely unrelated to the mystery. I had a hard time knowing what was connected and what was not connected. There were things that I thought the author had in for non-mystery reasons, and in the end they were part of the mystery. There were things I thought would be part of the mystery and were not in the end.

The thing that bothered me the most was how unhealthy Ana and Christian's relationship is. It isn’t so much how he acts than how she acts. He is controlling, possessive, and screwed up. But he is consistent and honest. Ana is almost lying to him. She is constantly rebelling against him or complaining that he treats her like a child. But one cross word and she backs down whimpering. It isn’t so much that he dominates her as it is that she will do anything to keep him happy. She will ignore what she wants or needs to do what she thinks would make him happy. The sad part is that based on what he does in the rest of the books, he would give her what she needs and wants most of the time, just to make her happy. He would try to work with her, if she stood strong in what she wanted, but she folds as soon as he gets upset.