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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Grownup fun, February 20, 2011
This review is from: Bedtime Stories: A Collection of Erotic Fairy Tales (Paperback)
Retelling old stories in new ways is as old as storytelling itself, and Johnson contributes nicely to this grand tradition. She also recalls that today's children's stories were once for adults, and can be again.
These eight tales have their ups and downs - "Princess on a Glass Hill" and "Beauty and the Beast" succeed best, I think. They succeed by taking only the bare bones of the story and fleshing it out in wholly new ways. The Princess, for example, is a research scientist, the hill is the gravitational potential between Earth and moon, and she's cloistered by the corporation making money from her discoveries instead of a jealous father.
As far as the "Erotic" part goes - well, don't get your hopes up. There's a pleasantly steamy scene in each of the retellings, but their brevity and mildness won't suit anyone looking for real intensity. Set your expectations properly and this can be a light but enjoyable read, even if not the one-handed kind the title might lead you to hope for.
-- wiredweird
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some of these stories really needed more space!, April 27, 2010
This review is from: Bedtime Stories: A Collection of Erotic Fairy Tales (Paperback)
Bedtime Stories: A Collection of Erotic Fairy Tales is an anthology by Jean Johnson, who brought us the wonderful "Sons of Destiny" series. This time she takes a bunch of traditional fairy tales and turns them on their heads, giving them new contexts and an erotic twist. Or as the back of the book says, "an anthology of scandalous imagination that gives new meaning to the words happy ending."
The eight stories included in this anthology are The Frog Prince, The Courtship of Wali Daad, The Princess on the Glass Hill, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Puss-in-Boots, and The King Who Heard a Joke. Jean takes quite the liberties with them, including turning Glass Hill, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty into sci-fi tales, and gender-bending Sleeping Beauty. In some stories this works extremely well (Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorites); in others it doesn't really add much that's new (Beauty and the Beast). As for the Glass Hill, I felt that the story needed to be twice as long---the characters weren't developed well enough for me to buy into their developments and changes.
That said, there are some true gems in here! The frog's-eye view on things in the Frog Prince is charming; the Courtship of Wali Daad is delightfully entertaining and romantic; and Puss-in-Boots is hilariously fun! Fans of Jean's "Nightfall/Sons of Destiny" series will love "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." The erotic material definitely sizzles throughout, and Jean's sense of humor shines.
Consider my rating 3.5.
[NOTE: Review book provided by publisher]
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Should have been subtitled Romantic Fairy tales, not Erotic., November 6, 2010
This wasn't badly written, and a couple of the stories were amusing, but as erotica I thought it fell really flat.
The sex was mostly pretty vanilla and not all that titillating, and each and every sex scene was prefaced with vows of undying devotion and promises to marry,(or actual marriage), often during the couples first kisses. Most of these couples had met 2 hours or mere days before. I found this deeply creepy and off putting. I've got nothing really against romance, but this was so formulaic and weirdly conservative for a book with pretensions to erotica that I was thrown out of the story every time, I in fact began predicting when the marriage proposal was coming and groaning when it did. The author went through some major gymnastics in the plot at times just to make sure her protagonists were married before the act or at the very least sworn to monogamy. Depends on what you're into, of course, but I found this to be the opposite of sexy and just kind of sad.
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