Review: The Queen's Bastard by C.E. Murphy

[megwrites]

Title: The Queen's Bastard
Author: C.E. Murphy (mizkit, http://www.cemurphy.net)
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 432
Publisher Ballentine



Summary - The Queen's Bastard is an alternate fantasy world inspired by Elizabethan England, where the unmarried queen of Aulun (England), Lorraine, has a bastard daughter trained by her father, the queen's spy master, to be an assassin in her mother's service. Belinda is not just a spy and assassin, but possesses witchbreed magic just as her father does. When Belinda is sent on a treacherous mission into Gallin, to infiltrate the court of Lorraine's enemy, Queen Sandalia and her son Prince Javier, she discovers that she is not alone possessing witchbreed powers.



Why Read This Book? 2008 was, apparently, the Year of the Elizabethan Fantasy. It seems like there were a lot of novels this year that used the court of queen Elizabeth I as their basis. This one, however, stands out from the pack. It does not recite the history, but rather transforms it into a unique universe. While there are obvious analogues, there are also important changes made in the history so that the story can take on it's own life.

If you have read Ms. Murphy's other urban fantasy books and were uncertain of whether you liked her as a writer, definitely read this. I can assure you that she's stepped up her game in this book, and for this novel she brought it and brought it hard.

The politics in this novel never get in the way of the characters, of an innate understanding that politics (and even magic) are not forces like the wind, but the actions of people, who's motives may be unclear even to themselves.

The characters in this novel are deeply flawed, sometimes to the point of crossing the line between being good and evil. I very much appreciated that the people I read about were allowed to be ambitious, ruthless, careless, passionate, and sometimes just plain old fucked up without the author seeking to apologize for or mend the cracks that make them so interesting.

The court intrigue, also, is easy enough to follow. If you wanted to like books like Swordspoint but the details bored you, you might like this novel because the politics are less subtle and better stated because they are on a grander stage.

The protagonist, Belinda, is not always easily sympathized with, but is always fascinating. She struggles with having an identity after a life time of having been whatever others wanted her to be, and unlike other books which might have taken the easy way out, Belinda does not have a moment of clarity and discover herself. Instead, truer to life, she remains lost, undefined.

The novel's greatest strength is in allowing failure to happen, in not saving anyone at the last moment, in allowing Belinda to reap what she's sown.



What Might Trip You Up? If you don't care for court intrigues and politics at all, this novel will have very little appeal for you. It is structured around a very careful game between two queens, fighting for dominance over the other and their children, who dance around each other carefully in the cloak-and-dagger world of the court where everything comes in half-truths, nobody is truly a friend, and betrayal is always around the corner.

There are also some of the darker moments of the novel that might push a reader into not finishing.

Belinda, using her witchbreed abilities, rapes both Javier and one of her servants by making them sleep together against their will and then erases the memory of it from them. This sort of scene may be hard to take for some, especially since Belinda does such a good job of convincing herself that if they don't remember, it's no harm, no foul. Some readers may want to see more consequences and recrimination of Belinda, and it's simply not there.

Later in the novel there are also places where Belinda is so absorbed in her cover of being Beatrice that she cannot decide whether to call herself Belinda or Beatrice. That might also put readers off in some small way, though I wasn't bothered by it.

I will admit that there are places where the inner workings of Belinda's mind are somewhat ham-handedly done, and I was not entirely convinced of Belinda's childhood and her relationship with her father. As a reader, I felt unsatisfied that Belinda clung to her father and obeyed, when she was clearly capable of being so ruthless. I read Belinda as being a borderline sociopath, and so there were some moments when I felt she ought to have been colder, more deviant.

The first sex scene between Javier and Belinda (which is consentual, in case you worried) also might be more of a stretch than some people can make, and I felt there was just a touch of Harlequin Romance in the scene. If you're one of those folks who likes a darker, dirtier, less refined, we-ain't-nothin'-but-mammals kind of sex scene, this probably won't do anything for you. Still, it isn't the worst sex scene I've ever read, not by far, and it can be skipped over without any detriment to your reading.

The ending is also very obviously a set up for a sequel, with plenty of open ends for the next book. In the author's defense, it clearly says that it's the first in a series, so you were warned.


Overall assessment/grade? Overall, I give this book a very solid B+. Above all things, it is an exciting read. I can't think of any moments where the book was boring, slow, or otherwise dull. If you like a darker bent to your fantasy, and if the other Elizabethan books that came out this year didn't push your buttons, you might put this one on for size. While there are some minor stylistics demerits, the book never fails to keep the reader interesting in the story on the page, which is what a book is supposed to do.

The writing is good, never takes away from the story. The characters are wonderfully broken and vicious at moments, and I have to say that of all the books of it's ilk that came out this year, I think this one might be my personal favorite.