In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Pocket Merlin

I've been looking for ways to spice up my fantasies, and I figured reading some erotica would point my imagination in…, well pretty much any direction would have been more fun than where my mind has been. So I volunteered to review “Erotic Fairy Tales” by Mitzi Szereto.

This book is great for those who like to read between the lines. All the stories are written in a style reminiscent of children's books, without heavy details and descriptions - just enough writing to tell the reader what is going on, and let them fill in the details, to their satisfaction mentally and sexually.

With 15 stories, drawn from European, Oriental, Indian, and Persian cultures, the book caters to a wide cultural background. The sex acts featured in the book range from a Prince Charming with a foot fetish to a wide selection of whips (featured in at least four stories), voyeurism, same-sex and hetero-sex pairings, and lots of oral sex.

For those interested in the history of these tales, the author gives a two or three page summary of how the tales developed and were edited into the children’s tales we know now. Those sections are good reading if you love literary history, but are best skipped if you’re just looking for a steamy story.

One of the things that I'm of two minds about is the metaphors! There is nary a penis, vagina or clitoris in sight, but lots of nicknames for them through out the book. It would sometimes take me a page or more to realize that when the sleeping beauty was "working the spindle" she was really giving a hand job. This was rather irritating when I was reading myself to sleep, when what I wanted involved zero brain function. After reading the stories once I find the colorful descriptions much more enjoyable, and very hot reading.

This is a bedside staple for me. I like reading it when my imagination isn't working too well. There's not much else to say about a book—it doesn't change and doesn't degrade, so long as I watch out to keep lube off it.