Customer Reviews

Heir Apparent

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The other reviews for this book are all very positive-they say it's a great book, best they ever read or something like that, but they have next to no information on the book. I had to go the author's website to find out enough info to decide about purchasing the book. So here is a review with some real info, for those who want to know a little more before they purchase.

This first third of this book is set in 2070. Kaitlyn Rose is the Curator of Hampton Court Palace where she works with her boss and best friend. Colin Wycliffe, who is Curator of all Royal buildings open to the public. They've been flirting around forever and at the beginning of the book finally start to have romantic encounters. At the very beginning of the book Kaitlyn has to go into the Queens champers to let in Stone masons who are going to fix the only original window seat left over from the time of Henry VIII, since the rest of the castle was altered by other kings. She's terrified of the chambers because of something that happened before, but goes in anyway. Inside the window seat a mummy is found, and tests prove that it's about 500 years old and was 2 months pregnant when murdered by a blow to the head. A torn up letter found with her in the window seat leads everyone to believe the child is Henry VIII's. While in the Queens chambers with the archeologists a ghost attacks Kaitlyn. She believes it to be the ghost of Anne Boleyn.

Anyway, then Colin's half brother, Brighton, shows up, and she learns the truth about their family. It turns out that Brighton, along with being a terrible womanizer, has invented time travel, and though the secret service type agency he invented it for won't let his use it, the elderly queen (102 years old) will, to go back in time and fetch the young woman who will end up in the window seat, so her child can be the heir to the throne, since there is none.

So everyone goes back in time. Kaitlyn brings her own PJ's, coke, tampons, ect. (If you're going to time travel, you don't bring stuff from the present with you!) Henry VIII gets the hots for Kaitlyn, and dislikes Colin. Brighton has an affair with just about everyone, and other stuff happens, like Anne hating Kaitlyn because Henry likes her. Anne also acts like a shrew, which is stupid of her considering she recently failed to deliver the promised male heir to the throne.

All and all this is a good book. It's very entertaining. There are some problems. Though I really did like this book I had a lot of fun picking out some problems and making a list of them. This does not mean I disliked this book in any way; this is just me having some fun and being a little nitpicky.

* Anne's behavior makes no sense-she was a brilliant woman in real life who overthrew the most powerful church in the world and kept Henry at bay sexually for years and then attained the most powerful role a woman could have, but in this she is just begging to have her head cut off.

* The future the author invented isn't very convincing, or different from today (except for moments like when Colin says "Dam! I forgot to recharge my cell phones battery plate by zapping it with the ultra-violet light!") For instance breast cancer is still around and killing, which is sad.


* Kaitlyn wears a toe-ring to the Queen's birthday party.

* The author frequently left out sentence modifiers, making some sentences sound really weird.


* Colin and Kaitlyn go from friendship to complete love in about two days.) But otherwise this is an entertaining and fun read.

* The way the people speak in the beginning-the kind of British slang they use sounds totally off from other books I have read set in England. I'm not positive but I don't think the author is British, however this improves over time and she has the medieval language slang down.


* The aforementioned bringing modern items on a time traveling trip to the 1500s when having them found could very easily get you burned for being a witch.

Four point five stars.

This book needed help; it was obvious that the publisher did not provide a decent editor for the author to work with. The plot was interesting, but poorly executed. The characters of Henry and Anne were turned into buffoons and the other major characters did not fare much better. Why use the year 2070 as a starting point if you are not going to have the imagination to envision a world different from today? Time travel is a stretch, but done right it can be very entertaining. The errors in tense and word usage just made the experience of reading this book even more difficult.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, but I have to say that I was very disappointed. The plot was great, but the writing was as inconsistent as the characters. It sometimes seemed as if two or three different people were writing the book and none of them could decide in which direction the book should go. I also noticed a lot of typos.

Well, that's pretty much the way I had to look at this book and certainly the only way I finished it (although I don't think the author intended this to be a satirical farce). The basic premise sounded interesting for readers looking for an entertaining time slip of a book - masons working at Hampton Court in 2070 find a woman's body and a letter that leads them to believe that she was Henry VIII's mistress and pregnant. Curator Kaitlyn Rose has issues of her own, as Anne Boleyn's ghost seems to really have it in for her, and she's in love with her boss Colin. Half brothers Colin and Brighton (who have a mysterious past that shocks the you know what out of Kaitlyn)hate each other, and the aging Queen Mum sends them all back to Henry VIII's court to find the pregnant woman and bring her back to the future so England will have an heir. Once our intrepid time travelers arrive they hook up with Henry and Anne and their court and surprise (!) Henry immediately starts lusting after the beauteous Kaitlyn while the evil brother Brighton schemes to leave his hated brother Colin in the past. OK, now that I've put that down on paper it _is_ sounding a bit silly.

Where to begin on what is wrong with this book when there are so many places to start? First off, this is apparently self-published POD which means no editor. And boy did this book need editing. Typos on almost every page -- you instead of your, now instead of know,there instead of their, ware instead of wear, you're instead of your, 5:00 shadow and then two pages later it's five o'clock shadow -- get the picture? Now for the setting of London in 2070, outside of a few Jetsonesque like references to 3D TV, I really didn't get much feeling for being decades ahead of our current lifestyle. Worse yet, the way the dialogue was written in an attempt at British accents was way over the top - virtually every sentence had either bloke, bloody or bollocks in it.

Now for the story itself. Two men and a woman traveling alone walk right into Hampton Court and they're just accepted like that? No one is shocked at unmarried Kaitlyn traveling alone with two men and no chaperone? No lady to attend her? Righto. They're promptly given rooms by Henry and Kaitlyn's given the room of his absent mistress - yet still no lady to attend her. Worse yet, Colin comes and goes and spends the night (!!) in Kaitlyn's room and not an eyebrow raised. Want more? How about Anne Boleyn the Queen of England running off to the forest to make whoopee with Brighton and nobody notices? I could go on and on but you get the picture.

Now, why is this so campy and hysterically funny? For starters, the emergency kit brought along by Kaitlyn was priceless - "her tried and true pink and blue plaid pajama pants with their matching pink tank top", biscuits, diet cola, chocolate, tampons, anti-bacterial soap and lice killing shampoo (I did not need to read about the other part of her body that needed shampooing). Kaitlyn keeps getting tipsy during the Court entertainments and ends up on Colin's lap (!!), or better yet all the times she's mad about something and in front of the King and Queen she pouts and puts her arms akimbo. Although the flat out hands down winner that had me on the floor laughing was when our intrepid heroine displays her skill in martial arts and karate chops Henry's guards when they attempt to arrest Colin. One of my favorite quotes:

"Without hesitation, Henry snapped back into king mode, hastily slipped through the door, sans shirt, with his breeches half opened, barely containing his thwarted..." (I won't use the word but it starts with an "e").

There you have it, a silly plot filled with huge gaping holes that falls apart quickly, poor sentence structure laden with typos and way too many commas along with cartoon cut-out characters all add up to a mess of a book and a serious waste of a tree. If you find it at the used bookstore for a penny (no more) and want a few laughs go for it, otherwise skip this. It doesn't even deserve one star.

Now there are plenty of book reviewers out there who go out of their way to find some good in even the worst book.

I am not one of those reviewers.

This was a bad, bad book and I'm not afraid to say so. This book was so horrible that I'm not sure how to convey this level of bad-ness. Allow me to offer a synopsis:

Heir Apparent, despite being an attempt at historical fiction, is actually set in the future. We begin the story sometime in the latter half of this century in London. Kaitlyn and Colin, museum curators of the future, time-travel back to the court of King Henry VIII in order to....well, we're still not precisely sure what they were doing there, but it had something to do with preserving the Tudor bloodline and securing an heir for the throne in 21st century.

Life in the future, as presented in this novel, is painfully conveyed via dialogue throughout the story...

"I got home late last night and forgot to zap the battery-plate with the ultra-violet recharge light."
Heir Apparent, p. 42


or


"...unless you want to use the safe-solar chamber to dry, tan, and moisturize. It only takes a couple of seconds."
Heir Apparent, p. 59



How do they manage the time travel to Tudor England? I'm glad you asked....


"This is what I call my B.T.E. Remote, which is short for Bending Time Electrically. Basically, this 'television remote' if you will...can bend time with you in it, and send you to and from different places in time."
Heir Apparent, p. 8-9

Okay, perhaps I'm being a bit picky in the science department. After all, this is a work of fiction.

But when the characterizations, plot and dialogue are just as awful, the entire novel becomes a train wreck that you just cannot turn away from.

Once our erstwhile heroes actually arrive in Tudor England, they immediately run into Henry VIII and the evil Queen Anne. Henry, the randy royal, wants nothing more than to screw every female in his direct line of sight, while Anne engages in hair-pulling, bitch-slapping, knockdown, dragout catfights with her 21st century rival Caitlyn.

The rest of the story pretty much encapsulates Caitlyn and Colin's attempts to get back to their own time with their heads intact. I have no idea whether or not they actually achieved their initial objective. Things were fuzzy by the time we reached the end of this 350-page disaster.

My review contains some spoilers, so read at your own risk.. I've been thinking about reading this book since it was first published, but I always put it off for one reason or another. I admit that some of the reviews always made me think twice about buying it.

The novel begins in 2070 when a mummified and pregnant body of one Henry VIIII's mistresses is found in Hampton Court Palace. The body isn't the only weird thing going on at Hampton Court. Kaitlyn Rose, Hampton Court's curator, finds two paintings of ladies from the Tudor period. One of the women bears an uncanny resemblance to Kaitlyn. In fact, she could practically be Kaitlyn's twin! As if that isn't creepy enough, a malicious ghost is haunting Kaitlyn in the Queen's chambers. The ghost turns out to be none other than Anne Boleyn!

In 2070, the monarchy is on the brink of extinction. The Queen, repeatedly refered to as Old Mum, is withering away, and her only possible heirs are sterile. Kaitlyn Rose, her love interest, Colin, and his womanizing half-brother, Brighton, are sent on a time travel mission to collect the pregnant mistresss and her unborn child, who is to inherit the throne.

A little background on the time travelers. Kaitlyn and Colin not only work together, but have been best friends for years. They finally admit their feelings and become romantically involved before heading off to the sixteenth century. Brighton Jones, Colin's half-brother, is a chick magnet/scientist that tries to seduce anything with a pulse. I found this character particularly annoying and was seriously hoping the author would find a way to redeem him. No such luck!

When the threesome arrive in the sixteenth century, guess who is the first person they met? King Hal, of course. He immediately takes a liking to Kaitlyn and offers them room at court. Brighton gets into all kinds of mischief seducing women left and right, but he meets his match in Anne Boleyn.

I didn't find the novel as bad as some of the other reviewers, but I just could not get past how horribly Anne Boleyn was depicted. At least the author admitted that she misrepresented Anne and apologizes to her in the author's notes, but it was still unpleasant to see Anne written in this manner. In Heir Apparent, Anne is out to bed any man that will have her. There is a lot of seduction in this book. Henry wants to seduce Kaitlyn, Anne wants to seduce Colin, but then switches to Brighton. Brighton wants to seduce everyone!

Heir Apparent was a pretty entertaining, apart from the way Anne Boleyn was written. Three twenty-first-century people find out the hard way that King Henry VIII's court was everything history claims it was and worse. I think people who don't care much or know much about Anne Boleyn might enjoy this novel better than those people who do. For those who love a good Anne Boleyn read, I recommend Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn by Nell Gavin. It's not about time travel, but it is an excellent novel for those that have a soft spot for Anne Boleyn.

Heir Apparent is one of the best books I've read. It has it all; mystery, murder, romance, blackmail, and a wonderfully written Henry VIII! The intricate plot is full of unexpected twists and turns, which keep the pages turning. The author's ability to create a sense of place is fantastic, while the characters are well-rounded and colorful - especially, Brighton Jones, one of the best antagonists I've read in a long while. He's like J.R. from the 80's show, Dallas -- you love to hate him.
Overall, this is one book you shouldn't miss out on!
I hope there's a sequel in the works.

Imaginative, creative and well-written. This interesting, captivating book is a must read for anyone that enjoys history along with an imaginative glimpse into the future. It is packed with amazing characters who come to life and the chemistry between them is gripping. The writer has a knack of historically educating you while entertaining you with suspense, action and drama. The story also contains love and romance along the way. I couldn't put the book down and felt as though I was right there along with the characters, experiencing their adventures and emotions. This is a brilliantly written book - an amazing, detailed story that you will not be disappointed with. Looking forward to sequels to come!

I love it when a book has a certain "voice," and Vangen-Ratcliffe nailed it in this book (like "bullocks"!). I typically don't like sci-fi or time travel, but the real stories here are the characters and the relationships (sexual and other). Kaitlyn's stubborn streak makes her oh-so-likeable (maybe because I see some of myself in her??). There were so many plot twists and yet there were no strings left dangling. Reading entertainment at its best!

This is the best book I have ever read! The suspense and drama throughout the book keeps you going, it's hard to put the book down at night. The author gives us a glimpse of the past in such an entertaining way, that you actually believe you are living in those times. Hope to see a sequel to this. This book is a keeper, worth the money! Thanks Sheri, Squirl