Okay, I first read this book in high school. Yes, high school, and I thought I was a total bad ass. I kept the book around for shock value, and because any page you turn to has some kind of kinky sex happening in it.

I re-read it as an adult and though this is the best book in the series, it's still fairly mild and I am not a fan.

Anne Rice has taken a fairy tale and turned it into a kinky sex slave voyage of Mary Sue "Beauty" who is rescued by the prince and taken back to the castle for spanking and punishment. This is sort of a more grown up version of your favorite Disney flick, but like--pretty hard core. If you're not into spanking and spanking and spanking, with a little bit of spanking thrown in and a spanking scene every now and then, this is not the type of erotica for you.

I personally am not into BSDM so it might be obvious as to why I did not thoroughly enjoy this classic Anne Rice porno-lit as much as the die hards out there who write fanfic to this day about it, but as much as this book is jam packed with violent sex scenes and red welts and overuse of the word "manhood" while referring to penises, there is a plot.

The plot is pretty undeveloped and peppered with spanking scenes every 3 paragraphs but it's there.

So basically, Beauty is kissed awake by a handsome prince, and she also happens to wake up naked. Prince tells her "hey, you're my sex slave now, come with me," and her parents are all "go with the nice man honey!" because he's fucking gorgeous, I guess. Once she gets to the castle, we find that Beauty is among several hundred other naked sex slaves who all must crawl through the castle and be thrust upon statues with hard marble erections and stuff. It's cool though, once the queen (Prince's mother) is finished with them they're bundled up and shipped back to their loving parents at home.

Right.

Beauty totally gets into it though and decides to be a very good slave, and becomes a favorite of the Prince. She even takes on a mistress! But she also has the hots for this young prince who basically wants to fuck her shit. And then there's the other Prince slave who is purposely disobedient. She wants his cock too.

Even though she was all well liked and respected, she decided to fuck up so she could get sent off to "the village" too, where she would be used for hard degrading work and punished ten times harder than she'd ever been punished before. This is where the second book picks up, but we'll get into that in a separate review.

Trouble is, the writing is shit. It's wordy and redundant, it's unnecessarily pushing boundaries that really don't need to be pushed, so regardless of whether you're into S&M and degrading sex acts, you'll probably find that the writing will make you choke just a little. It may even keep you from enjoying it. There aren't even any likable characters! No character depth or development, it's just that bad, people.

My guess is that Anne Rice had fun with her crazy Mary Sue and got her rocks off, but the rest of us are kind of left to say "what the fuck did I just stay up and read this for?" AND THERE ARE TWO OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES. Thanks Ms. Rice, thank you.