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A review by sunfishcakes
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by A.N. Roquelaure, Anne Rice
2.0
Oddly readable but it gets boring pretty quickly. I was kind of curious as to how a whole novel-length story of erotica would go, and turns out you really need some buffer periods in between or else it all kind of blurs together into sludge. This is especially true when the kinks boil down to sexual torture to forcefully break in a submissive masochist. And that isn't even touching the elements I found more repulsive and unpleasant (spent most of the book pretending that the protagonist wasn't an underage teenager).
This isn't really my set of kinks. I read the Wikipedia summaries as a teen out of morbid curiosity, and then realized as an adult I could read them myself. Unfortunately, I think the Wikipedia summaries basically suffice. (The introduction from 2012 was honestly quite interesting and nice though. Better than the whole book.) But I feel even with the fetishes in mind as the goal, it just felt like it dragged a lot once we hit the castle and while parts were more dramatically intriguing, at some point just straightforward eroticism of the same themes and fixations can only sustain itself for so long. It just feels repetitive after a while, especially when you hit the slog of Alexi's gnarly backstory. Not to ask for political intrigue in the BDSM sex slave world fairytale, but some of that sprinkled in might've genuinely helped some things. (Yeah, I'm thinking of Captive Prince here, and I definitely think Pacat read some of these books.) Like, despite everything I was kind of curious to what happens later in terms of plot and worldbuilding (especially with the 4th book that's apparently aboutBeauty becoming the new BDSM dom queen? ), but I would not be able get through three (3!!!) more books. So I just read the summaries of those on Wikipedia and lol.
I like Rice's writing style okay enough though (though almost exclusively using "sex" to refer to genitalia got tiring pretty fast), and I get the feeling I would better appreciate a book with not only a real plot, but with a narrative by her that has some dramatic and tonal variety. But if you like some taboo BDSM sex slave stuff with a gratuitous amount of spanking, maybe this is for you.
This isn't really my set of kinks. I read the Wikipedia summaries as a teen out of morbid curiosity, and then realized as an adult I could read them myself. Unfortunately, I think the Wikipedia summaries basically suffice. (The introduction from 2012 was honestly quite interesting and nice though. Better than the whole book.) But I feel even with the fetishes in mind as the goal, it just felt like it dragged a lot once we hit the castle and while parts were more dramatically intriguing, at some point just straightforward eroticism of the same themes and fixations can only sustain itself for so long. It just feels repetitive after a while, especially when you hit the slog of Alexi's gnarly backstory. Not to ask for political intrigue in the BDSM sex slave world fairytale, but some of that sprinkled in might've genuinely helped some things. (Yeah, I'm thinking of Captive Prince here, and I definitely think Pacat read some of these books.) Like, despite everything I was kind of curious to what happens later in terms of plot and worldbuilding (especially with the 4th book that's apparently about
I like Rice's writing style okay enough though (though almost exclusively using "sex" to refer to genitalia got tiring pretty fast), and I get the feeling I would better appreciate a book with not only a real plot, but with a narrative by her that has some dramatic and tonal variety. But if you like some taboo BDSM sex slave stuff with a gratuitous amount of spanking, maybe this is for you.