The Pretender's Crown

An alien race seeds Earth with its operatives, who look like humans but have psychic abilities. They carefully guide human civilization over generations, and while doing so some of these alien spies have children with humans. One of these children is Belinda Primrose, the unacknowledged daughter of an alien spy and the Virgin Queen of England. In [b:The Queen's Bastard|482987|The Queen's Bastard|Robin Maxwell|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348711360s/482987.jpg|1435621], she discovered her abilities and true parentage in the midst of a spy mission in an enemy court. Now, she has returned to England, where she becomes the queen's acknowledged heir, has lots of dubious consenting sex with practically every character, and show more flits around Europe scheming and being schemed against. A seemingly never ending supply of other characters are given their own POV chapters. Every single character is the cleverest, handsomest, and most physically adept. The sheer number of unbelievably gifted characters is overwhelming, as are the interminable scenes in which they verbally joust with each other. The plot, such as it is, is jarringly paced and too often depends on decisions that make no sense, or that strain credulity (such as: the English queen secretly gave birth to twins by her alien spymaster. She let the alien keep the girl, but then gave birth to a boy and wanted it killed as a threat to her reign. (How her alien lover didn't realize she was having twins, I don't know. He can sense the particulars of all other pregnancies in this book as easily as reading a sign, but sensing two life forms in a woman he's around constantly is apparently beyond him.) A different alien spy took her boy child and gave it to the queen of Scotland, who'd miscarried earlier, and she raises the English queen's boy as her own son and heir. The twins then meet as adults, fall in love, have lots of sex, and betray each other. Or, another example: the king of Scotland decides he needs to marry a barren guttersnipe (his words) who he doesn't even love in order to get his country to love him. Which is ridiculous--beyond the fact that he knows she cannot give him an heir, he already has the people's loyalty and love, as seen by countless scenes of them wildly cheering him. Why not just keep himself free to marry a royal who'll actually bring possible heirs and political allies with her?) It's all very melodramatic and poorly thought through. This book is basically a soap opera that takes itself far too seriously. show less

I enjoyed this volume even more than the first. While I'm disappointed that there probably won't be any more books written in this series, I feel it was an acceptable place to stop. No major cliffhangers and the epilogue provided a nice wrap up while still leaving it open for more if the author ever has the opportunity to pick it back up.

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