58 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not for everyone, October 31, 2007
As you have no doubt noticed, the reviews of this book vary widely. I just got it and wasn't really sure what to expect, but I can't put it down. Heed the bad reviews; it is certainly not for everyone. However, I am a big snob concerning erotica, and I have never liked Ann Rice before, and I was very pleasantly surprised by this book.
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is not at all realistic, though why anyone would be looking for realism in a fairy tale/erotica combination that begins with the Prince breaking a spell of a 100-year sleep is beyond me. Everyone is impossibly beautiful, but so are all the princesses in Grimms' fairy tales and the principals in most erotica. I, for one, enjoy reading about a bunch of beautiful, exquisitely dressed people within impossibly opulent settings.
There certainly are a lot of spankings, nearly in every chapter. If you like that kind of thing, you won't be bored. If it's not your cup of tea, it might get old. I don't find it monotonous; maybe repetitive, but that's not necessarily bad. The Marquis de Sade is repetitive too; spanking is repetitive by nature. There's a lot going on in The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty besides spanking as well. Many of the principals are what would be considered underage in the present-day United States, and consent is questionable at best. Again, you're the judge of whether that would turn you on or off.
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is at heart a Nouveau-Décadent work. I just reread Beardsley's Under the Hill and Rice's book is very reminiscent of that style. (By the way, most Décadent works are unrealistic and light on plot.) If you like Sade or Mirbeau, or certain passages in Petronius or Suetonius, you'll probably like this. If you don't like eroticized violence or overwrought language, or you want erotica with consensual, loving, adult partners of clearly defined sexual orientation, this is not for you.
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44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed! Thought it was going to be a love story., February 10, 2006
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.
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401 of 526 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Preposterous, October 18, 2004
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.
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