Alice hates school and her teachers, and is regularly in trouble for rudeness, inattentiveness and repeated failure to do her homework. She does love her busy working mother though, and it is Alice who prepares the evening meal when she gets home from school. Life would likely have continued on this basis had it not been for Martin, her mum's new boyfriend. Martin is charming and kind, but when Alice is rude to her mum, Charles becomes very stern. Alice is happy when her mom and Martin marry, and even starts attending church, where quite a number of attendees practice domestic discipline - something which Martin heartily approves of. But on the suggestion of the Reverend Moreland, Alice finds herself on a cruise with Martin, where Martin is instructed how to take his misbehaving daughter in hand and spank her properly with various implements. This regime continues when they return home, with harsh bare bottom punishments to be endured on Thursday evenings. Alice has an increasingly sore bottom... and yet the threat of corporal punishment is a deterrent and helps to improve her behaviour. Martin becomes the loving father she never had; no longer rebellious, she makes friends and begins to excel at school, to the surprise and admiration of her teachers. Ultimately, Alice becomes motivated, hard-working and happy, appreciating the benefits of a spanked bottom and a loving family.
The book itself is pretty fun to be honest, I like it alot. Apart from one thing. Dr Kirkside should have, one night as he leaves home, be kidnapped by his victims and be put through the wringer like the ones attending the course. It should have ended with him been getting a crash course of the same 6 weeks, on the recieving end. The way his demonstrations work seems to me that he has not felt half of these implements himself, which is why he so chidingly can set rules for girls who have not been bad to recieve hellish punishments in the name of instruction. Honestly, fuck that wannabe Dom piece of shit. The rest of the book is very good, and would have gotten 5 stars, but Dr Shitside is so annoying and such a quack that it brings the rating down.
Although this book is fantasy (so labeled on page 1) and of course fiction, and fun to read as escapism, Ms. Thomas makes a compelling case for corporal punishment as a behavior modification method with merit. If done without anger, with love, with consistency and safety, and with advance knowledge of the young woman to be punished that CP will be the painful immediate consequence of bad behaviors. Plus, don't you want to know how our young adult Alice finds herself in a passage of her own yeses that lead to ... ?