Product Description
Rice writing as A. N. Roquelaure.
In the traditional folk tale “Sleeping Beauty,” the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. Anne Rice’s retelling of the Beauty story probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire.
Holly Flores @ 8:22 pm
…the water’s warm! But, seriously, I had heard about this erotic novel for some time and for some reason, never took the time to read it. Big mistake! It was that good for me. Of course, I am totally into these bdsm or s/d books and finding good ones has become increasingly hard. But, still, this sensual erotica tale is just what I was looking for. Anne Rice isn’t just for fans of vampire fiction, i.e. “Interview w/the Vampire”. This one is for any reader who WANTS sexy literature and wants to enter into another world. A very high recommend to anyone who wants to explore subjects of this nauture, along with Breaking the Girl and Eager to Please: Two Erotic Novels of Submission.
Edward M. Reilly @ 10:22 pm
The most outstanding feature of this book is the fact that it rambles on for so long.
As is mentioned in so many reviews, only 1-2 pages even make reference to the Sleeping Beauty legend. Furthermore, not only is there no context for the kingdom in which the no-doubt syphilitic queen and prince reign, but the author only occasionally attempts to invoke the apparently mediaeval period in which the tale is set by throwing in words like “breeches,” “ermine,” or in one case a “pointed” damsel “hat.”
I purchased this book for a book group meeting – I’m just glad that I finished it quickly enough to pass it around to everyone else in the group so as to minimize sales of this rubbish.
S. C. Mitchell @ 10:23 pm
Let me make clear at the outset, I am no kinkophobe. I can certainly enjoy a bit of … let’s call it “consensual rope”; I’ve read some blindfolded-and-tied-to-the-bed scenarios that I enjoyed a lot. But I have a very peculiar kink of my own: I like the fiction I read, even the erotica, to make some kind of sense. I like my readings to hang together, to be based at least on some frail thread of real-world logic.
And these don’t and aren’t. Rice’s “Beauty” trilogy is almost comically implausible. I think it was Shirley Jackson who offered a bit of advice to writers of fiction: the reader, she said, may accept for the purposes of a given story that there exists a Land of Oz, but he will not accept that he can see the Land of Oz from his kitchen window. Similarly, I can accept that there exists such a phenomenon as sexual slavery; but I cannot, for this or any other story, accept the notion that sexual slavery was the linchpin for the entire socioeconomic structure of Medieval Europe.
And yet this is the notion on which the entire series is based. “Beauty” and her “Prince” are unusual only in that he has *taken* her after awakening her from her hundred-year sleep. The rest of the slaves in his mother’s palace — dozens or hundreds of them, princes and princesses all, and every one not merely attractive but exquisitely beautiful — are “tribute”, sent by their royal parents from the surrounding kingdoms. (I valiantly resist the temptation to render that as “kinkdoms”.) In this palace, they spend several years learning to be completely obedient and submissive sexual property (being spanked, being publicly displayed, being spanked, crawling around on their hands and knees, being spanked, being forced into various forms of pony-play, being spanked, picking up rosebuds from the floor with their teeth, being spanked, calling grooms and pages and kitchen help “my lord,” being spanked); then they return to their own lands. And this situation has obtained long enough that Beauty’s own parents, over a century before, served in this way themselves. Apparently every kingdom and principality in Europe participates in this one-sided “tribute” arrangement.
Oh … did I mention that Rice *really* likes to describe her princes and princesses being spanked?
Also, Rice seems to have included any notion that struck her as “erotic” at the time, without stopping to consider the real-world implications. “Dear god, who knew that Ms. Rice had such a disgustingly vast knowledge of sexual torture”, one review asked: well, she DOESN’T. She has no idea what she’s writing about: Anne Rice is completely ignorant, irresponsibly so, about her subject matter. What we see in the “Hall of Punishments”, to give one specific example, would cripple or kill a human being within a very few hours, although we’re told that “punishments” are not to cause injury, only pain.
There were things in this book that bothered poor squeamish little me in other ways. I believe I’ve made clear that I thought Rice’s obsession with spanking — and spanking, and spanking, and spanking, and spanking — her characters grew monotonous, excruciatingly so. And I REALLY didn’t need the specific information that the fifteen-year-old heroine’s “groom” arranges her hair in such a way as to make her look even younger than she is. (Nor is this the most offensive item. In the grotesquely racist third volume, Rice crosses the line into obvious pedophilia, mentioning the specific presence of “little boys” .)
And it goes on, and on, and on. Spanking. Tying up. Spanking. Lovingly detailed descriptions of how humiliated the heroine feels. More spanking. Leather straps. Suspension. Spanking. Pony-play (apparently this fantasy version of Medieval Europe has no draft animals at all, only “princes”). More humiliation. Spanking.
I can only apply to this astoundingly tedious book, and to its sequels, that single worst word that can be applied to any piece of erotica:
They are BORING.
Sydney @ 12:44 am
Being a submissive female myself, I was really excited when I first started reading this book, thinking it was going to be a bdsm love story between the Prince and Beauty. Boy was I wrong. Now the first three chapters didn’t dissapoint in this respect; the early scenes with the Prince and Beauty were sexy and romantic. But as soon as they arrived at the castle, the Prince just sort of left the picture. And that was pretty much the end of any semblance of a male dom/female sub focus.
I kept waiting for him to reappear in the book, but he never did. Also, his character seemed changed after he arrived at the castle…much weaker and very pathetic…no guts to stand up to his mother and protect Beauty. All the characters seemed really shallow too, with no real concept of what love is.
The rest of the book was basically just just about spankings, and punishment, and humiliation…which really isn’t erotic at all to me without the context of a loving relationship between the participants. Needless to say, I was very disappointed with the way this book turned out. If the focus had stayed on Beauty and the Prince, I think it would have been great. But as it is, it was a major disappointment. So if you’re looking for some romantic, sexy, male dom/female sub bdsm, you’d be much better off reading [...] than this one.
Olivia @ 2:34 am
I read many of the online reviews before ordering this book and I hoped that the reason the rating was so low was because of the reaction that more conservative people had to this book rather than the novel itself.
This book highlighted something that I think many readers of Anne Rice have seen – Rice has lowered herself to the standard of a formulaic writer. She is boring and bored with her work and it really shows. I, and many others, are becoming tired of her unneccessary first-person narratives inserted any time she thinks that her weak plot is about to crash and burn. Why should we suddenly care about the life of a secondary character? She doesn’t give us any reason to. We are sick of her obsession with ribbon-wearing, dancing young girls and bored of New Orleans, Rio, and San Fransisco.
My biggest problem with the plot was the fact that Beauty is obsessed with Alexi for most of the book and then for some unknown reason she forgets him and jumps into the arms of someone we’ve never heard of before. For NO reason. And, this shift of plot happens six pages before the book ends!