The Queen's Bastard (The Inheritors' Cycle, Book 1) Review

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The Queen's Bastard (The Inheritors' Cycle, Book 1) ReviewThis 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).The Queen's Bastard (The Inheritors' Cycle, Book 1) Overview

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