Rating: 
Summary: Seductive Forbidden Love
Review: With a beautiful mixture of description and sexual desire, Anne Rice takes you into a world of passion and forbidden love. The pulse of your heart will start to rage like a powerfull rapid while jsut into the first couple pages. The thought will cross your mind to deney the boundries of age for love. An amazing and seductive story of a young girl with many sexual powers and a writter with many sexual desires. A must read...
Rating: 
Summary: Overall a good read
Review: When I first bought Belinda, I was excited becase I had just finished Cry to Heaven, which I had absolutely fallen in love with. Nevertheless, I was really disappointed in the beginning of Belinda. It was really slow and had too many details. But as it drew to a close, that's when I couldn't put it down. The last half of the book was heart-clenching - it's just too bad the beginning didn't start out the same! Although I definitely recommend reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating, Belinda is work in its own
Review: I found Belinda to be an exceptional work of art. The writing was exquisite as was the storyline. A beautiful story of socially unacceptable love, passion, and fantasies between a beloved middle-aged childrens author, and a sixteen year old run away. It is the story of their undying love for one another, and the misery that befalls them. Once again Anne Rice is captivating and spills over her readers minds with picturistic details and lavish beauty.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Novel!
Review: Despite a couple of negative reviews on Amazon, I thoroughly enjoyed Belinda. Not only is it well-written, but also extremely engrossing. I could not put the book down! Anne Rice, one of my favourite authors, weaves a fascinating tale about an artist and his model, including bad childhoods, the harm of the media spotlight, what happens behind closed doors, and two tortured minds that find solace in each other. The novel is filled with humour and delicious details. However, if this kind of book is not your thing, read THE WITCHING HOUR to see the extend of Rice's great talent. Very highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Belinda is a must read
Review: Once I read Belinda, I practically forgot the Vampire Chronicles existed. Belinda is the best book I've ever read in my entire life (and I've read a few in my time!) The narration, settings, and characters shift throughout the book, making it fascinatingly complex. First, you're carried through the lives of Belinda and Jeremy as they begin their life together, then there's the desperate mystery Jeremy tries to solve about Belinda's true identity, then the conclusion which brings the enormous cast of characters together for one last hurrah! The characters are overwhelmingly original, unbelievable and fantastic. Rice paints each one with vibrant colors and tones that you won't see anywhere else. At some points, it seems as if everyone is suffering from an excess of personality, but as Rice indicates from the Stan Rice poem she chose to open with, excess is the point of the book. Excess is everwhere in Belinda, from the characters to the storyline to the backdrop of San Francisco-New Orleans-Europe. Rice painstakingly describes each detail: the lushness of New Orleans, the bright, cleanliness of San Francisco, the dusty childhood relics that make up Jeremy's life, the bitter heartache of his search for Belinda's identity, the beauty and relief he finds by painting her... To the casual reader, the book might just seem like a cop-out of Lolita. But it's not. Here, the wiser, knowledgeable person is Belinda; the child is Jeremy. He learns from her what life is supposed to be about; together they overcome the secrets of their pasts and move on to new beginnings. For years, Jeremy was locked into painting images of little girls roaming through dark, eery houses. In reality, Jeremy and Belinda were both wandering through their own shadows, unable to shake the darkness of their past. Belinda brought light into Jeremy's world and he, in return, gave her the voice that was stolen from her by painting her pictures. If you read this book and think it is lousy, then maybe you should read it again. Take time to enjoy the excess...
Rating:
Summary: A Must read
Review: Another applauded book from an avid reader of Anne Rice
Rating: 
Summary: Pure Trash
Review: In the tradition of other best selling "Tinseltown Trash" authors--Collins, Krantz and Korda immediately spring to mind--this book works. Unfortunately, the style is dated, the story is dragged out, the characters are hard to care about, self absorbed, petty, vain, childish, hedonistic, and those are just the good guys! The whole thing is hard to believe--I know it is fiction and believe me I can suspend belief long enough to enjoy a good story--but this did not fit the bill. No way! Anne uses too many exclamation points in her dialog! And there are too too too many superlatives and details, details and more details--get the idea? And do we need to be reminded every 2 seconds of how beautiful everyone in this book is? The globe trotting is fun to read. The sex is a snore--so if you are buying this for its allegedly erotic content, you have been warned. I have read more explicit stuff in the Bible! A child's fairy tale has more erotic overtones than this howler! And as for the romance--it is so contrived--purely lust in love's clothing. Yeah, Belinda is a worldly 16 year old but she is till too immature for 44 year old Jeremy. And yes, this 44 year old acts very much his age--except when he turns into a 15 year old horn dog all too eager to do the deed with Belinda. Who is also, all too eager to do it with Jeremy. And yet with all this sex going on, the book is rather sexless. This is where Rice skimps on the details...! What irony. An erotic book minus the erotica. What next? A book of poetry minus the poems? If you long for the days of wine and roses, for get it. But if you have a jones for big hair, and big egos ala Alexis Carrington in Dynasty (which is referenced here too showing that Rice knows exaxtly what's she's doing!) crossed with Humbert Humbert's Lolita (another work referenced in this book) then this book is for you. So pour yourself a glass of Scotch (Belinda's drink of choice...see how classy this teen is?) and smoke a few foreign cigaretes, pop a foreign film (never call it a movie!) into the VCR for the right Eurotrash ambience, and curl up with this potboiler. And don't forget to hang on, folks--it's gonna be a bumpy ride!
Rating: 
Summary: Lolita a la lousy
Review: This book just gets worse and worse! Second time reading it (I stopped a long time ago and had to slog through the first half again just for any of it to make sense.) Icky tacky Euro trash feeling permeates each page. Like Dynasty or something but not as fun and campy. Like a soap opera on steroids. Yes, it's THAT bad! Loltia...er, I mean Belinda, is a little blonde sexpot, jailbait, child star, wordlier than thou waif, who's been there, done everything and everybody. She's seen the world and has great style, high brow tastes and charm galore, yet she had does every drink and drug imaginable (Oh yes, that's sophistication, Anne!) and downs Scotch and cigarettes as if they were cookies and milk. She's got mucho dollars in the bank but lives on the street under an assumed identity. She is womanly enough for Jeremy to boink, but he loves to get her dressed up like a three year old first. Then he photographs and paints his muse, naked, in a variety of child-like settings. So this is what passes for erotic now? Maybe to pedophiles and some fetishists, but not to me! The sex scenes are a snore. Some homosexual and lesbian references round out an otherwise totally unerotic book. Expecting smut? Pass on this one and pick up a copy of any of the Sleeping Beauty novels instead. Expecting a meaty story? Hah! This ones is all style no substance, all glitz no glory, all prose and no purpose. Artsy fartsy. Heavily detailed. Eurotrash. Like the set of a bad B movie, cheesy porn flick and child's morning show all rolled in one with a hearty helping of nighttime soaps a la the 1980's. Dated. Poorly written (but much easier to read than most of Rice's heavy handed fiction). Characters I don't relate to or want to relate to. Insipid, banal, two dimensional, airheads--the whole lot of them! If this were a movie, Drew Barrymore would be a cinch to play Belinda (she'd have to drop a few pounds first to fit the 5'4'' 100 pound description). She exudes enough 'little girl lost' appeal on and off the screen to make it believable. But why bother? It's all been there and done before in a myriad of bad TV miniseries, cable movies, straight to video soft cores, and night time soaps. This book does not live up to the blurb on the back. It is not erotic. It is inane. Read Lolita instead, preferably while listening to Sting's "Don't Stand So Close to Me."
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I thought this book was intriguing. Once I started I couldn't put it down. It ranks right up there with the rest of Rice's novels. I applaude.
Rating:
Summary: a disappointing read for an avid anne rice fan!
Review: I read this book about 6 years ago when I first started reading Anne Rice's books. I had already devoured most of her published books (at that time) and this one fell drastically short of what I had come to expect and love from this brilliant woman! I failed to see the same eloquent and sometimes subtle eroticism that I had come to love about her works. This book seemed borderline "smuttish" to me. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has never read any of her works before. However, I feel that most avid fans of her works are capable of deciding whether or not this really is up to the same high standards she set for herself.
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