Ian Fleming, 50s misogynist, probably made a huge mistake telling this story from a woman’s POV. He lost me at “All woman love semi-rape.”

Bond doesn’t show up until 40% of the way, and it’s a typical bad guys stand off good guys at a upstate New York motel. Tbh, it’s something Chandler or Thompson would have done better.

It’s a poor story, poorly told. The only redeeming factor: it is quite short.

Unless you’re a James Bond die-hard, skip it.

Although this book is often labeled "experimental," it's really a pretty conventional hardboiled noir story of a fallen woman in distress, who calls upon the services (and killer instincts) of a mysterious stranger. The only things "experimental" about it are an introduction from Ian Fleming on the supposed provenance of the manuscript, first-person narration from said woman in distress, and Bond's late appearance in the story. The overall story is entertaining and well-executed, albeit frequently sexist. The 1977 movie is a better Bond movie than the book is a Bond book, but in the Roger Moore era, that's not saying much. It simply borrows the title of this novel, then tells a completely different story, a globe-trotting adventure that borrows elements from other, better Bond films (e.g. ski chases, a train fight with a Russian henchman, sharks)and throws in a few wink-wink jibes at other pop culture phenomena from the mid-70s (e.g. human henchman Jaws wrestles a shark ... and wins!). It's less campy than "Moonraker," despite having a similar supervillain scheme, and more politically correct than "Live and Let Die," but not quite as clever with the source material as "For Your Eyes Only." I do have a soft spot for it in my movie viewing history, as one of my favorite Matchbox vehicles was Bond's amphibious car, and it's not only the first Bond movie I can remember seeing on TV, but one of the first ones for which I can remember enjoying the Mad Magazine parody.

Just awful. Bond doesn't come in until 75% into the novel. The first two parts are spent with Viv, the protagonist, explaining her awful love life. One of which is in abuse, the other ends in abortion. It is a very bad novel. Then, Bond is there for a little bit and eventually just ends up leaving her after explaining what happened after Thunderball. Never again..

This is a curates egg of a Bond book. Mostly because it's not really about Bond at all who only turns up two thirds of the way through. And it's odd because in some ways, it would've been a better story if this wasn't a Bond book at all, but just a standalone story Ian Fleming had written about the main character, Vivian, and her life.
Considering who wrote it and when, a Fleming coming of age story about a woman could've been a disaster, but its portrayal of some of the realities of life for young women in the 1950s rings sort of true, if a little one dimensional. Yes there are some dodgy sexual politics but that's the realities of the 1950s.
Anyway, it's an oddity that doesn't add anything to the James Bond canon, but is an interesting insight into Ian Fleming the author.

I'm trudging through the original Bond novels and this one was not one of the best. James doesn't show up until the last third of the book and then only to save the day. It's not a spy novel at all. Honestly, it kind of sucked.

When he wrote From Russia With Love - increasingly looking like the real masterpiece on my Bond journey - Fleming experimented with the form by beginning the book from the Russian perspective to allow you to draw your conclusions about the similarities between the agents on both sides. He tries a similar experiment here, with James not even figuring in the narrative until he appears as a Deus ex Machina fifty pages from the end, and the whole story told from the archetypal Bond girl.

In principle this should be quite good but in practice it doesn’t quite work, the whole first 100 pages are very kitchen sinky Angry Young Man stuff, which format mesh with the Chandleresque back half when Bond shows up. Perhaps unsurprisingly Fleming is not quite convincing as a woman’s perspective either, with the announcement that all woman enjoy rape a bit and that a Central European character is a bit of a nazi.

While FRWL let you draw your own conclusions about the similarities between bond and his counterparts, Fleming wants to make the same point here too but it’s delivered as a lecturing final chapter clumsily mansplained to his protagonist.

If Fleming didn’t want to carry on writing Bond novels after the Thunderball fiasco, why didn’t he just write something else?

Unfortunately, no one goes into a Bond novel expecting to find women being treated with respect - in Ian Fleming’s style, women - and, to be frank, most other characters - are simply props for Bond to use as he sees fit. However, where most other novels still have some value as spy thrillers with mostly fun plots, this one gets terrible real fast.
In The Spy Who Loved Me (side note: the plot of the film version has nothing to do with the book), Fleming thought it would be a good idea to write from the point of view of the ‘Bond girl’. It wasn’t. The book is highly misogynistic, and much, much worse than what Fleming would usually write.
All in all, probably the worst of all Bond novels (I haven’t read them all yet, but I doubt it can get much worse than this). Fortunately, it’s a relatively minor one - Bond doesn’t even show up before the last third - so, if you haven’t read it, please take my advice and just skip it. You won’t be sorry.