Look, I need to say this upfront: I did not expect to be listening to this in my car in the garage at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, gripping my steering wheel, wondering what exactly my life choices have led to. Because this book? This is not the cozy comfort read I usually reach for after a day of breaking up fights over who gets the blue cup.
But here we are.
The One Where I Couldn't Listen During School Drop-Off
Let me be extremely clear about something. This is Book 3 of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy, written under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, and it is wall-to-wall explicit. I'm talking "frantically hitting pause because Emma asked why the lady on the speaker sounds like that" explicit. This is a car-time-only, kids-asleep, doors-locked kind of listen. I cannot stress this enough.
Beauty gets captured by a Sultan and spends most of the book in a harem, and Rice writes every single detail of that experience with the kind of lush, almost hypnotic prose that makes you forget you're sitting in a Honda Odyssey surrounded by crushed goldfish crackers. The power dynamics are intense - like, genuinely psychologically intense - and if that's not your thing, this will not convert you. But Rice isn't just writing shock value here. There's this weird intellectual undercurrent running through everything, like she's using the fairy tale framework to ask real questions about surrender and desire and identity. It's smarter than it has any right to be. Hotter You Burn has that same quality where the heat is doing real emotional work underneath — though the pacing there is considerably tighter.
That said, the pacing. Oh, the pacing. There are stretches in the middle - particularly the extended harem sequences - where the plot basically stops moving and you're just... marinating. In a lot of sensation. For a long time. I caught myself checking how much time was left more than once, which is never a great sign.
Steele's Baritone Did Things I Wasn't Prepared For
The dual narration setup actually works really well here. Corbin Steele handles the male perspectives and - I'm just going to say it - when he drops into that low register for command scenes, it hits different. Like, physically different. There's this almost vibration quality to his voice during those moments that made me turn the volume down even though I was completely alone. Just in case.
Samantha Prescott takes the female perspectives and does something clever with pacing - she measurably slows down during submission scenes, stretching syllables in a way that puts you inside the character's headspace whether you want to be there or not. It's effective. Maybe too effective? During the group scenes, there's this stereo panning thing happening where voices shift left to right, which created a surprisingly spatial feeling even through my car speakers.
The production quality is genuinely high. No weird audio glitches, no jarring transitions between narrators. At 1.25x speed (my standard), the pacing actually improved - those slow stretches tightened up nicely and Steele's voice still carried all its weight.
Who This Is (and Definitely Isn't) For
This is not a book you half-listen to while loading the dishwasher. I tried. You lose the thread immediately because Rice writes in these long, winding, sensory-heavy passages that require your actual brain. It survived maybe 12 pauses before I gave up multitasking and committed to dedicated listening sessions.
If you've read (or listened to) the first two books, you know what you're signing up for and this delivers a conclusion. Not groundbreaking, but satisfying in its way - the characters end up in places that feel earned, even if the journey there meanders. If you haven't read the others, absolutely do not start here. You'll be lost AND uncomfortable.
And if you're a mom like me who usually lives in the rom-com and contemporary fiction lane? This is... a detour. A significant detour. Into very different territory. I'm not sorry I took it - there's something weirdly liberating about listening to something so far outside your usual rotation - but I'm also going back to my regularly scheduled programming now.
My book club will love this. If I ever have time for book club again. And if I ever have the nerve to suggest it.
Back to the Goldfish Crackers
At 9 hours and 14 minutes, this is manageable in about a week of dedicated car-time sessions. The narration elevates material that could easily feel repetitive, and Rice's prose - even when it's doing too much - has a quality that keeps your ear engaged. It's not my usual lane. It won't become my usual lane. But sometimes you need a book that reminds you that you're a whole person with a brain and not just someone who knows all the words to "Baby Shark."
Made me blush at a red light. Worth it though.
