Sarah's Library

14/2 - I keep getting the Fifty storylines confused with Bared to You.  In this situation I would usually say to myself that I need to go back and re-read the Fifty trilogy again to reacquaint myself with what happened and in order to separate the plot from the Bared to You plot.  The only problem with the normal solution is that, as you can see from my Fifty reviews, I didn't really like the Fifty trilogy, certainly not enough to re-read any of them - so I guess I'm stuck with overlapping plots replaying in my head as I read, kind of like a double-exposed photo.  Although there are a lot of very similar elements and general plot lines, fortunately they're not exact copies, especially not in the BDSM area.  In one scene Eva practically invites him to hurt her and he refuses to saying that he could never hurt her; when I read those lines I couldn't help but imagine what Christian Grey would have done - something that probably involved sore palms.

15/2 - According to the back of the book this is a darker version of Fifty.  I totally disagree.  Reflected in you has characters who are even more stuffed up than Ana and Christian, but there's almost no violence and no one who wants to inflict pain but holds themselves back because it scares the other person (and rightly so).  Eva is a much more complex and realistic character than Ana, I didn't find myself silently telling her to run, not walk, away from Gideon before he does some serious physical damage to her (as I was while reading FSoG).  And I don't find Gideon physically scary the way I did Christian Grey, I wasn't reading on eggshells waiting for Gideon to explode over something Eva did that he didn't like.  Sure he got frustrated with some of the things Eva did, but I never felt like he was about to commit domestic violence against her and put her in the hospital the way I did reading FSoG.  I was suprised by how much of the book Eva and Gideon spend apart - they spend half the book fighting and half of what's left having angry sex that doesn't make anything better.  One character that I did spend most of the book wanting to shake until his brain rattled was Cary, he drove me crazy constantly trying to ruin his almost relationship with Trey (who seemed like a nice, normal guy who could support Cary if he would let him).  This book almost doesn't fit in the BDSM category, it just read like a normal contemporary romance with very complex characters.  I can't wait to see how the trilogy is going to end.