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It's been a while since anybody posted a book review on here and I know for a fact that a lot of EVE-Online players are avid readers. Fnord, Monalisa Overdrive, I know you're out there. :) And I know you love to read. It had been a while since I picked up a good Anne Rice book. In my teens I would lap up most of her novels like a spotty teenager flicks through a porn magazine. I was really hooked on her vampire chronicles. And at some point I might review some of my favourites ones.  Lately however, I am beginning to find some of Rice's newer publications a lot less like her more famous style of writing. I'm not entirely sure why maybe it's her age or maybe she's just lost the spark. But that's just my opinion. Maybe if you're stuck writing one particular subject for as long as she has been purely on the assumption of what works sells. Then you go stale eventually. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty isn't really anything like the Vampire or Witch Chronicles. It is a lot more daring, and at first you are fooled into thinking that this is just some dreamy fairy tale set in a medieval fantasy world. The words, the imagery flows like a delicious red wine. One bottle just isn't enough. But when you realise this book isn't a dreamy fairy tale it's as if someone dropped their wine glass. Prince Charming really isn't a nice hearted guy, and maybe you need to think twice about wanting to be Sleeping Beauty or not. She slept 100 years only to be given the rudest wake up call and then be dragged naked to a castle where she is not the only slave much to her dissapointment - she is a Princess afterall. The palace is governed by the Prince's mother, the Queen who rules over everything and whose temperament is a bit on the sadistic side coaching her son to be the same. Not a book for the faint hearted, this is classed as a BDSM book even if by my standards it's pretty mellow and still written all romanticised which I liked.
I highly enjoyed The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty but when it comes to the entire box set. I was actually really dissapointed. The first book seemed great but then Rice ends up by attempting to change up the tone and feel of the book by making Beauty's character this unpredictable free-willey woman who jumps on every first bandwagon she see's which really ruined her character for me. Fair enough Rice tries to build up her character and break her away from her quiet submissivness. Attempting to force this initially meak woman into being this wild spirited uncontrolable being. But it is so out of her character that you just don't buy it or end up thinking she's mentally unsound and so it makes the next two novels really weird, weak and for me quite boring. By the time you get mid way into the second novel. You're left with very little left to the imagination and infact you gradually find yourself getting bored by the whole thing. The sex scenes really aren't all that and the situations Beauty gets herself into are only mildiy interesting. By the time Rice had got to the 2nd and 3rd novels she seems to have taken it all too seriously. And tried to turn what began as a heavily erotic book into more of a detailed psycho analysis of the anti-heroine Beauty. The first novel is slightly dreamy, slightly romantic, sort of edgy, raw and a bit tourmenting but ultimately sexual. Highly reccommend book number 1. Check out book number 2 purely for curiosity reasons and then run as fast as you can from book number 3.
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