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TechnoTV - The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $7.44
Your Save: $ 7.56 ( 50% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Plume
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780452281424
ISBN: 0452281423
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 1999-05-01
Publisher: Plume
Studio: Plume
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: So disappointed in Anne Rice.
Comment: I read some of the bad reviews before I purchased this book. I realized some people claimed this book was nothing but generic porn, but considering it was written by Anne Rice, I thought the book must have some redeeming qualities. I was wrong. Anne Rice took a beautiful fairytale and turned it into a grotesque display of homo/heterosexual brutality. I almost feel embarassed for Mrs Rice and wonder what drove her to write such complete and utter drivel. Spankings, spankings and more spankings! Black, white, gold paddles. Spankings for punishments, spankings as rewards, spankings just for the heck of it! If I wasn't so disgusted with this book, I would actually laugh.
But what really disturbed me is that all these Princes and Princess that the Queen and her Princes keep for their own sexual amusement are mere children. One of the Princes kept her in room as her person sexual slave was 16. My negative review has nothing to do with me being a prude or not. It's one thing to write a kinky book for adults about adults. That I can live with, but this book crossed the line. Some of the people brutalized in the most horrendous ways are children. I can't believe this book was even published. It's a pedophile's dream come true. This book is going into the trash because I never want to lay eyes on it again. Nice knowing you Anne Rice.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting..
Comment: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Well unlike some of the reviews that I have read for this series, I find that Anne Rice's depiction of Sleeping Beauty to be interesting. The entire series (which I have read all 3 books thank you) is set to go beyond what we would percieve as torture. It tests the bounries of what a human body and mind can handle. If you can not be open minding to that then I suggestive not to read this series then. It is not ment to be set to what others think is okay (kinky wise)...as for the spanking..well hellooo! Spanking is one of the lowest form of digration!..
Customer Rating:
Summary: Totally awesome!!!!!
Comment: this story is really fun it gives you different perception of what's lust and true love means.... anne rice is so good!!!!! i hope everyone will like it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Spank me if I ever open this book again!
Comment: This book is the most repetitious book I have ever not completed reading. It takes a classic love story and turns it into ridiculous tale of bondage and punishment over and over and over again. It would have liked it better if Sleeping Beauty would have ate a bushel of apples and went into a irreversible coma on about the 3rd page. Oh, did I mention that this book is repetitious?
Customer Rating:
Summary: A brilliant concept stripped of characters and reduced to repetition, the book fails. Not recommended
Comment: The Prince wakens Beauty from her century of sleep--and then, as his reward for saving the castle, takes her as his prize. He leads Beauty back to his kingdom, where foreign princes and princesses are trained to be sexual slaves, willingly submitting to the most "depraved" desires. The fairy tale premise strips the story of characterization and justifies an unbelievable land where Beauty and a hundred other royals undergo public and state-sanctioned humiliating display, oft-repeated spankings, and sexual encounters which never require consent. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty has a few darkly erotic moments but quickly disintegrates into repetition, and lacks character growth which might grant it some sense of purpose. I do not plan to read the sequels, and I do not recommend this book.
Initially, the premise of Claiming appears to have beautiful simplicity, but this simplicity is its biggest downfall. An untouched Beauty, woken from endless sleep into vivid life by a Prince--the concept leads easily into sexual overtones. However, fairy tales are brief and reiterative, and trade character for archetype: the sleeping Beauty, the warrior Prince. Rice maintains both aspects. She cannot sustain the simple concept over a novel's length, and the story quickly becomes repetitious: humiliation, spankings, sex, humiliation, spanking, sex. Beauty believes that each instance is worse than the last, but it's hard for the reader to agree. Not much varies besides the order of events, and sometimes a slave is tied up for a while or there's a bit of sodomy, but other than that the book drives in the same circle until the end. Beauty and Prince have little characterization outside of their titles, and while Beauty eventually encounters characters with names and the ghost of an identity, on the whole characterization is kept to a minimum. Without characterization, there is no character growth and no one for the reader to identify with and care about, stripping the story of any sense of purpose.
To be fair, the whole book is not a cycle of simple repetition. Claiming has a few moments of dark eroticism, where the encounter is conceived in such a way that it is appealing to the sympathetic mind (which is to say that the content tends towards idealized sexual violence not unlike BDSM, and may not suit all readers). Such moments, however, are the exception rather than the rule. The number of spankings, each one just like the one before, is so exaggerated that one begins to wonder if Rice has a fetish. On a less humorous note, the variations on sex and punishment tread on the edge of objectionable--not because the two can't be intermixed, but because Rice intermixes them without stopping for consent. To a certain extent, the fairy tale setting justifies this: the Prince's kingdom is an absurd land stripped of characters and run on fetishized sex, wholly unbelievable and therefore excused from rational details like reasonable doubt and sexual consent. But the setting can't excuse the fact that the book begins when the Prince rapes Beauty to wake her and then orders her into slavery against her will. Nevermind the fact that Beauty is forever aroused by her trails--the fantasy of the entire book is still tainted.
There is ample room in literature for erotic fairy tales--especially for eroticism that reveals or revels in the darkness of human nature. (The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a breathtaking example of such, and I highly recommend it.) The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, bogged down by blank-faced characters and dozen of identical spankings, plummets where it should soar. The result is a novel with only moments of erotic interest, never thought-provoking or intriguing but instead unbelievable, repetitious, and slightly unsettling. Rice cannot maintain the concept over a mere 250 pages, and I doubt that the two sequels are any better--I don't plan to read them. I was disappointed by this book, and I don't recommend it.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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