The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

Rating:
Summary: can't decide
Review: on one hand i hated the book but on the other, i came when i thought about it... hmmmmm.
anyway, this book was recomened to my by a collegue at work, i must say that i will look at her different now,
anyway, this is what i think:
-anne rice is a great writer, she knows how to describe scenes very well and how to disturb your mind very well also.
-this book has no plot, or character development
-describes a bunch of stuff
i will admit the book had me intrigued though. so thats why i won't give it too bad of a rating, if you have some time and want to read something new go for it because i don't think it's like anything you've ever read before.
the thing that amazes me is that i didn't like the book but i couldn't put it down! go fig

Rating:
Summary: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Rice Anne
Review: It was absolutely horrible. There was no plot, no character development. I kept wanting to yell at them because their actions were not atoll logical. She didn't even get "Beauty"s name right. (In the original tale, had she took the time to look into it before trying to even loosely base a story around it, her name was Princess Aurora or Rose. The name Beauty was only ever applied as a description.) Now, I am not easily offended; I can watch and read sadistic, masochistic, hardcore, bondage, dominatrix- odd even- porn all day, but I was offended here; Mostly I think because many of the things she described as painful but harmless would kill a person. The redundant spankings and humiliation got to be just too predictable.
I am so sad I wasted my time and money on this garbage. Save yourself if it isn't too late. Get a real book or buy a porn video or just hold the money you would be saving in your hand and take a moment to enjoy doing nothing rather then wasting your time on this piece of refuse.

Rating:
Summary: Lazy and Slatternly Writing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing
Review: I actually am a fan of Rice's Vampire Chronicles. But even just reading the first few pages of this book and skimming the rest was enough to leave me feeling disturbed for several days. I wouldn't reccomend reading this book unless you have a strong stomach for things such as rape and sexual torture.

Rating:
Summary: Silly and disturbing - what a combination!
Review: After reading "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty" I had to ask myself "What was that all about?" I at first thought it would be erotica embedded in fairy-tale fantasy. I am a very sex positive and open person and yet I found this book disturbing. Let me give a short plot summary, then my theory of Ann Rice's message, and then the 3 major weeknesses of this book.

First, the story is pure fantasy. Beauty is awakened from 100 years of sleep by a Prince having intercourse with her. She is sent by her parents to be a sexual slave in the palace of the Prince's mother. Here she undergoes a broad range of sexual experiences but spanking was far more frequent that vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse. There are so many spankings that the book borders on being boring and dull.

Second, Ann Rice seems to implicitly imply that only through complete obedience and submission can an individual fully experience sexual pleasure. What in the writings of the great sexual theorists Freud, Kinsey,, Money, Pomeroy, Masters, and Johonson would support this? The research literature would support that masochistic submissive sexual pleasure is but one of a braod range of sexual behaviors by which human beings can experience sexual pleasure. Unfortunately Rice focuses so much on spankings that she is really writing more about the sexual pleasure of a spanking than she is about masochism and submission.

There are three fatal flaws to this novel. First, Rice developed cardboard,one dimensional, dull characters and despite all the butt tanning they do not develop personally or interpersonally. There is no personal growth or intraspection. Beauty gains experience but no insight. That is tragic and pitiful.

Second, there is no real plot. There is no historic chain of events that interact with the characters to challenge or support their character development. In Tolstoy's great War and Peace, the characters grow, change, develop while being tossed and displaced by Napoleon's march to Moscow. History and character interact in real life and in good fiction. This does not happen in this book. Characters fall into silly situations in which they become passive sex objects rather than creatively adapt to the force of history.

Third, there is no justice. The book left me perplexed as to why anyone with an IQ of 10 and half a brain would allow themselves to be humilitated and physically harmed without giving somebody a black eye.

Rating:
Summary: WELL WRITTEN, BUT EROTICA?????
Review: Ms. Rice has given us a good bit of writing here. I have to agree with several other reviewers in that it really has nothing to do with the tale of Sleeping Beauty, other than the title. Now as to the erotica. I suppose that should be decided by the individual reader. I like a good erotic book and good erotic writing. I am a big Anais Nin fan. This work though, the sleeping beauty work, is only erotic if you are very much into hard core S&M, which is not my particular cup of tea. Ms. Rice is rather repetiive at times. Some of this stuff is rather scary, as a matter of fact. As an example, raping a unconscious fifteen year old girl, from my point of view, is sort of stomach turning and disgusting - way over the top. That being said, I must admit that the authors discriptive powers are quite acute and if you are into such things as complete total humiliation, which some are I suppose, then this is good. I read somewhere that the author set out to write a book of pure pornography. I do feel she was sucessful with this one (and the two that followed). All in all, I think the book is well done. I am glad I read it. I doubt if I would seek out it's ilk again though, but then that is just me.

Rating:
Summary: Preposterous
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Pleasures of Pain
Review: This is quite possibly the best written erotica I have ever come across! The story captured me and I just could not put it down. The characters are so beautifuly written and the way Rice has discribes their "punishments" and longing so wonderfully. Dont listen to those nasty little 1-3 star reviews, this happens to be a great book for anyone interested in the art of erotica. I especially recommend it for any first time erotica readers. 5 stars all the way!