At the end of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Princess Beauty had consciously brought upon herself her own banishment from the pleasures and luxuries of the Queen’s castle.

Beauty’s Punishment opens with Beauty and fellow slave, Tristan, being auctioned off to the highest bidders during a public sale of their services. Both are filled with fear for the punishments that lie ahead of them, but, at the same time, eager to explore the depths of their submission.

“Did she long to be hurled downward, away from the high Court of ornate and clever rituals imposed upon her, into some wilderness of disregard where the humiliations and spanking blows would come just as hard and just as fast but with a greater, more savage abandon?”

Spoiler alert: Yes. To “be hurled downward” is exactly what Beauty wanted.

The story alternates between Beauty’s experiences as a slave at a local inn and Tristan’s journey as he falls in love with a master harsh enough to tame his inner rebelliousness.

“I almost wept when he lifted my face. He pointed to a small jar on a little shelf in the paneled wall. At once I opened it. The cream in it was thick and pure white. He pointed to his cock and at once I took some of the cream on my fingers. But before I applied it, I kissed the tip and tasted a little trace of moisture. I dabbed my tongue into the tiny hole, gathering all that was there of the clear fluid.”

Rather than bring a new set of punishments to the series, Rice’s account of the master/slave dynamic in the village is simply a continuation and deepening of what began in the series’ first novel. There is still more spanking than you can shake a stick at. The slaves are still constantly desperate for physical release. The masters still find their pleasure in gratuitous acts of cruelty.

Whereas I enjoyed The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty for its literary over its erotic value, I read Beauty’s Punishment almost entirely for the plot. I wanted to see what happened to the characters. I was curious as to what they would do next.

Rice doesn’t disappoint when it comes to plot, but the sex did become tedious. What was simply un-erotic in the first book became almost cumbersome in the second.

There seemed to be a standard formulation behind it all: the master ordered the slave’s punishment, the slave was scared of the punishment, the slave accepted the punishment and then became uncontrollably horny.

The repetition wasn’t awful and the writing made it all bearable (I’m starting to sound like one of the slaves), but towards the end I did find myself checking to see how much of the book was left.

Like the first in the series, Beauty’s Punishment is an interesting read but not a terribly titillating one.