By Pam BTOE August 20, 2012 15:32

50 Shades Bluer... Or Was That Redder

For those of you who would rather head for a garden somewhere (now it has finally stopped raining) and stretch out on a lounger with a bit of 'summer holiday reading', than tidy up behind the kids for the zillionth time this summer, a new Trilogy has been hitting the shelves and turning cheeks unaccountably redder... we might have put it down to sunburn if we hadn't known better.

E L James has spotted a gap in the female reading market apparently, targetting those who have never got on with a 'Mills & Boon' type Romance, still less with the jam-making, domestic goddess set, women who in fact appear to have been looking for something a little darker. This has probably proved as much a shock to the women themselves as it would be to their partners if they were willing to share the discovery. But when it is just too sunny to contemplate grey reality with the likes of Jo Nesbo or Henning Mankell, women everywhere have been dropping a different shade of grey into the bottom of the supermarket trolley alongside the soap powder and the 'would-be' barbecue steaks.

Christian Grey, the elusive millionaire who wants to take over your life and dominate your every move, is not exactly the kind of man most liberated women would admit to wanting in their lives, yet there he is, unexpectedly alongside the bottled water in their trolleys.  A fantasy yes, and one that has many feminists up in arms, and one would have thought the mother's of teenage daughters wincing in horror...but strangely it is these mothers who appear to be the main buyers into the fantasy.  

Who would have thought a millionaire to sweep you off your feet, buy you a car, take care of your every need, even choose the food you can put in your mouth and cook it for you, then carry you away to a chamber of dark secrets to carry out his erotic fantasies... would rival Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte? Ahh well, after the shock of the first book, maybe he's just Mr Rochester in new garb after all...