The Queen's Bastard [Paperback]

This is a simple story of a trained assassin who also happens to be the bastard daughter of a queen. Our heroine is Belinda Primrose, raised by the queen's spymaster. She kills her way around Europe, posing as a lower class girl, and is finally given a cushy but more demanding posting in an enemy country, where she becomes the prince's lover. Rather than killing, she must prove her wit by finding evidence of a political plot. Unfortunately for her, she finds that the prince is the only person besides her father to share her own magical powers, and in their mutual feelings of loneliness and their feelings of empathy for each other, real love blooms. The fantasy/sci fi elements are low key.

I want to like this book, I really do, but I have several problems with it. Firstly, the plot to take down the enemy queen because she has some claim to territory belonging to Lorraine, Belinda's queen, shows poor diplomatic planning. There's a real absence to heirs to most of the thrones in play, with almost all of them going to Javier, Belinda's prince. Lorraine has no heir, and without an heir to continue her own political interests after death, it would make more sense to naturalize Belinda and marry her off to Javier, or just plain naturalize Belinda and make her the heir to the throne. The problem of Lorraine's lack of an heir needs to be solved before she tries to remove the other queens from her playing board, but it never even comes up in the story. Big gaping plot hole here that nagged me through the entire book.

Secondly, the book often depicts the weakness of women's positions. Yes, historically women of all classes have held less power than men. I think, however, that they managed to get through their daily lives without constantly thinking about the injustice of the world toward their sex. It's great to draw attention to the dark ages before the sexual revolution, but I'd rather see the characters coping with their regular lives than going about like a Monty Python peasant constantly thinking about how oppressed she is. It gets old.

And of course there's the masochism of Belinda's repression and the dominance/submission issues that run through every sexual encounter and almost all of Belinda's flirting. For the most part, this added to the story, but there's an extended physical and emotional rape scene, at which point the characterization of Belinda and Marius falls apart at the seams some. From that point on, when sex comes up, Belinda changes personalities and is neither herself nor her assumed role of Beatrice. It's as if Murphy wanted to write a sexually aggressive woman, but failed to write it into the character early enough. It's a very abrupt change from the doesn't care about sex attitude she had before, and if its going to be blamed on her witchpower then it needed to either be more subtle or more answers provided for the reader.

I'm torn over whether I want to read more of this series or not. It set up some interesting characters (though by the end of the book I found myself unhappy with all of them), uses multiple perspectives to tell a broader tale (though the switch between past and present tense can be irritating), and has some interesting political and social moves that I really like (including some of the sexual politics).

On paper, this novel is right up my alley. Court intrigue plus magic plus sex? Where do I sign up? I've seen comparisons to the Kushiel series and it's not hard to see why; it's partly the intrigue/magic/sex combination and partly the prose, which is lush and has moments of exquisite beauty. It was the prose that hooked me from the first page.

Unfortunately, other factors "unhooked" me later in the book, and now I'm three-quarters of the way through _The Queen's Bastard_ and not really feeling the urge to go on.

First of all, having the Queen's secret illegitimate daughter become a spy is requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief on my part. One would think Queen Lorraine would want to overprotect Belinda, even if she didn't want to acknowledge her, in case there came a time when she needed to reveal her parentage and name her heir to the throne. So I don't think Lorraine would be sending Belinda into mortal danger. And even if Lorraine never planned to legitimize Belinda or name her heir, Belinda would be a valuable piece on the board in terms of dynastic marriages. So I can't see Lorraine sending Belinda to seduce in the name of espionage. She'd want to keep her untouched. Stifling, maybe, but such was the life of noblewomen of the time Murphy is evoking. Jacqueline Carey's Phedre was able to do the spy/courtesan thing because she was a commoner.

I managed to shove this out of my mind, though, and sink into the story, at least until Belinda lost my sympathy completely. I think what Murphy is trying to show is that Belinda's witchpower, once unleashed, takes over her in some way and goads her to dominate others, but I feel like it was taken too far in the scene where Belinda sets up her maid to be raped. Belinda lost me there. I put down the book for about a week after that, and when I started reading it again, I had to put the rape out of my mind in order to keep going and keep caring what happened to Belinda.

I agree with the previous reviewer who says that Belinda's sexual aggressiveness seems pasted on; if this was part of the character's personality, there needed to be hints of it sooner. As it is, the dominant Belinda fits uneasily alongside the daytime Belinda and her "stillness."

Now I find myself simply bogged down. I don't know if Belinda's supposed to be the heroine or the villain, and I've lost all my interest in the dramas of Prince Javier's circle of friends. It's a pity; I was so excited to read this book and now I can't seem to prod myself to finish it. Maybe I'll come back to it with fresh eyes another time and give it another try.

I will say that I am enjoying the conflict within Belinda about her motives for being with Javier. It's interesting watching her shift from doing it as a scheme to further Lorraine's ends, to wondering what she and Javier could do as a team.

I love the Urban Shaman series...I ADORE the Negoiator series so when I heard CE Murphy was putting out a new series about the [...] daughter of a Queen who is a spy/assasin, I was excited. I expected another series with supernatural elements and a new twist on the renaissance period.

I did not get what I was hoping for. I understand that as a spy the main character will have to do a lot of things to get the job done. But as the book wore on...I wasn't sure WHAT that job was anymore and it became obvious that this is not another urban paranormal novel: its an erotic novel. I have nothing against sex, but I don't like erotic novels, per se. I really wanted something like her other series. I feel like I was misled.

If you're looking for a book with a fair amount of sex, weak plot, and progessively unlikeable characters, pick this book up. If you want something like CE Murphy's earlier books...pass this one by. I hope Ms. Murphy does not become another Laurell K. Hamilton and starts writing books I can no longer stand. I'd hate to lose another author.

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