Helpful Score: 4
So many of my pals enjoyed this tale so I fully expected to love it, too. Unfortunately I didn't love it, I didn't even like it.
A king is puzzled that his twelve married daughters wake up each morning to find that their shoes have been completely worn out while they sleep. Several people have stepped forward trying to solve the mystery, yet no one has been able to. A wizardess comes through with an intriguing, yet seemingly impossible, answer. The king challenges her to prove her findings and to cure the reasons behind it, and the wizardess accepts the challenge and pays each princess a separate visit.
What started off as an intriguing and fanciful idea soon fell flat for me. Each short tale was eerily similar to the one before it. Each of the twelve princesses basically has the same problem, lack of communication with their spouses that has caused some sort of sexual and/or emotional issues. Yet within seconds of meeting each couple the wizardess finds twelve imaginative, different and entertaining ways to fix their problems. The couples come together, sexually, in what sometimes reads as a how-to guide for the sexually and/or emotionally inept.
While I found that most sexcapades were delicious and appealing to many different moods and appetites, the end of the book takes a turn for the worse with some of the deeds. One of the men actually beats his wife on the arse with a belt. Yes, I am aware that many people enjoy this sort of thing. My problem was with the malice behind the act rather than the act itself. Another husband resorts to electrically shocking his wife when she steps out of line as some sort of behavioral modification tool, I wanted to punch him.
Had I not known that this book was written by a woman I would have assumed it was penned by a recently divorced and severely embittered man. Each princess personifies and magnifies a negative stereotype associated with women. For example you have the angry feminist, the wife who has `let herself go', the prude, the martyr, the shrew, the woman who uses sex to get material things, etc. It was hard to fully enjoy the acts of intimacy when the characters were so unlikable. All in all I found the idea behind the stories and the humor behind each princess's names far more interesting than the actual stories themselves.
Cherise Everhard, January 2009
A king is puzzled that his twelve married daughters wake up each morning to find that their shoes have been completely worn out while they sleep. Several people have stepped forward trying to solve the mystery, yet no one has been able to. A wizardess comes through with an intriguing, yet seemingly impossible, answer. The king challenges her to prove her findings and to cure the reasons behind it, and the wizardess accepts the challenge and pays each princess a separate visit.
What started off as an intriguing and fanciful idea soon fell flat for me. Each short tale was eerily similar to the one before it. Each of the twelve princesses basically has the same problem, lack of communication with their spouses that has caused some sort of sexual and/or emotional issues. Yet within seconds of meeting each couple the wizardess finds twelve imaginative, different and entertaining ways to fix their problems. The couples come together, sexually, in what sometimes reads as a how-to guide for the sexually and/or emotionally inept.
While I found that most sexcapades were delicious and appealing to many different moods and appetites, the end of the book takes a turn for the worse with some of the deeds. One of the men actually beats his wife on the arse with a belt. Yes, I am aware that many people enjoy this sort of thing. My problem was with the malice behind the act rather than the act itself. Another husband resorts to electrically shocking his wife when she steps out of line as some sort of behavioral modification tool, I wanted to punch him.
Had I not known that this book was written by a woman I would have assumed it was penned by a recently divorced and severely embittered man. Each princess personifies and magnifies a negative stereotype associated with women. For example you have the angry feminist, the wife who has `let herself go', the prude, the martyr, the shrew, the woman who uses sex to get material things, etc. It was hard to fully enjoy the acts of intimacy when the characters were so unlikable. All in all I found the idea behind the stories and the humor behind each princess's names far more interesting than the actual stories themselves.
Cherise Everhard, January 2009
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