This book was our Club Fantasci book of the month in November, and it’s written by Anne Rice. What a waste of time that was. You can read my cohosts’ reviews and see the video of our discussion at the Club Fantasci website. With such limited time for reading, I’d advise you to skip this one, it was, well, read on…

This is erotica? If you liked getting spanked, over and over and over and over, (yawn), you’ll love this book. It has a plethora of paddles, red bottoms and erections, but a lack of characters with a brain.

Sleeping Beauty was kidnapped (although her parents let her go, knowing what was going to happen – idiots), taken to a distant kingdom of fetishist spanking people, who paddled her behind every day until it was red-raw. One of her male counterparts, a prince from another land, who was also taken for this purpose, was not only beaten, but repeatedly raped to the point, in the real world, of death. How is this sexy? Ok, so there’s a few tantalizing descriptions of genitals glistening etc but generally I wanted to step into the book, seize Beauty’s mind and escape so I could go home, gather my army and return to the spanking kingdom to kill every last noble.

This book was unrealistic, repetitive to the point of boredom, and I didn’t particularly like any of the characters. The ‘good’ characters need to grow a backbone and brain and the ‘bad’ characters are just an appendage joined to a spanking paddle.

The only redeeming feature of the book was the last page, where something actually happened and I wondered what would happen next; oh and there were no typos. Seriously, don’t bother.