As Friesner herself compares in her afterword, among the Princesses of Myth, Maeve is most like Helen. Nefertiti and Himiko were historical figures, but Helen and Maeve are in the realm of myth and legend.
Deception's Princess is a wild ride of constant changes. Set around 1st Century Ireland, Maeve is the sixth daughter of the man who becomes the high king shortly after the book begins when she's only five. Her father offers her and her sisters five cows apiece if they'll get along while he's gone on a cattle raid. Maeve decides to choose her own cows, then determines to have her father's prize black bull. She does end up marking the bull by cutting off part of its tail hair and is almost killed while fleeing the enraged animal, but is saved by luck and her removed dress untying itself from around her neck and flying into the bull's face. Thus, Maeve becomes her father's favorite. Though she never does get the bull.
As she grows older, Maeve's sisters leave for fostering, which is some bizarre practice where other royal households raise your kids and you raise theirs. Yeah, I don't get it. Maeve's father keeps her at home though and she comes to realize it's because she's his prize. As she calls it, she's the true "hero's portion," the biggest reward her father will give someone in the future because she comes tied to the kingdom of Connacht.
There are several plotlines that take place over the course of the book. I'll highlight the main ones.
Young Maeve wants one of her father's men to train her in fighting. During a gathering, a wolfhound belonging to one of the high-ranked men attacks a hound's puppies and the pregnant girlfriend of Maeve's fight trainer. Maeve steps in to save the girlfriend (she's a maid of some kind) and wards off the dog until one of her father's men arrives and kills it. Naturally, there's undeserved punishment going on because it's never the highborn asshole's fault. Maeve's fight trainer ends up having to reveal himself and shortly after ends up dead in what was basically a duel. His girlfriend and their child don't survive childbirth. Maeve is heartbroken by all this.
Then a druid and his son arrive. Maeve is drawn to the son, who enjoys rehabilitating wild animals more than learning to be a druid. (I almost typing "learning druidity." Just gonna make up words.) Maeve is unhappy to see the level of power the druid wields over her father and the growing relationship between Maeve and the son leads to a huge conflict. This culminates in the asshole druid following the pair to the area they've set up as a rehab and he just kills animals in cold blood, including the pet fox his son had for years. And the repercussions? Zero. Because Maeve's father is a huge pussy. I actually dreaded rereading this book because of that animal slaughter scene. It's not graphic but it is terrible to read. I'm still hoping she somehow gets revenge on that fucker, but I have a feeling she won't. Sigh. Points off for killing animals as a plotline, Friesner. It's always weak. So Maeve's faith in her father is seriously shaken, the druid and his son leave, and Maeve is lost.
Her mother is pregnant and then gives birth to triplets. Therefore Maeve realizes she's no longer the hero's portion. Stupid incidents lead to her being sung about badly in bards' songs and the friend of the family bard goes off to the kingdom of the guy who started the worst of the rumors in an attempt to squash them. He ends up being taken prisoner and a messenger comes to Maeve's father saying he wants to take her in fosterage in exchange for the bard's life. This guy's been working against her father for a bit now and Maeve's seen through him the entire time, so she's off on her own to team up with three of her father's men and use trickery to capture the bad guy, rescue the bard, and save the day. And she totally pulls it off in a fairly realistic manner. However, one of the men is the guy who killed her fight trainer way back when and she's never forgiven him, but she sees how tortured he is by what he'd done all those years ago. She gets him to tell her the whole story. Basically, her father was so angry that her fight trainer agreed to train her which gave her skills that would put her in danger that he forced this man to set the fight trainer up in a duel and kill him. So here's yet another way her father now looks horrible to Maeve. Once she meets up with him again, he offers her a reward for saving the day and she chooses fosterage.
One of the animals she and the druid's son helped rehab was a kestrel that she was particularly fond of. She had thought the druid killed her, but she learned from her bard that people train birds of prey and that in one realm, there was a kestrel with a bracelet made of red hair around its ankle. A bracelet made of Maeve's own hair, she realized. So Maeve requests to be fostered in that kingdom so she can find her beloved Ea once again. It helps that the kingdom is run by her mother's best friend's cousin. So that's what the second book is going to be about.
This is the only book in the series I hadn't ever read before. I got about half through then took a few weeks' break, but now I've finished it tonight.
Maeve's life in her new fosterage position isn't great. She's got to get used to being around girls her age and having less freedom, but she handles that rather well at the beginning. She also sneaks off to visit Ea and ends up befriending Kian, the "prince" of her new home.
The new cast of characters ends up being mostly unpleasant. One of the three other fosterlings is an overweight, weak-willed follower of a girl. The other two are a haughty bitch who thinks she's better than everyone and the palace slut. Honestly, I'm not typically a slut-shamer, but in the olden days when you're looking for a husband, it probably doesn't help to be so desperate to find one that you screw half the warriors in the place. Things start out somewhat well with these girls, but when the fourth one comes back home, things go sour. She's the nasty ringleader who gets mad if anyone else gets a compliment. Worse, she's the sister of Maeve's childhood fight trainer. Their relationship is rocky at the start because this mean girl likes the prince who likes Maeve, but when the mean girl finds out Maeve is the one who got her brother killed, no matter how inadvertently, she uses her mean girl powers to make the others join her in making Maeve's life a physically and emotionally abusive living hell. It was really hard to read how these little bitches all ganged up on Maeve and then how the lady of the ringfort did jack shit about it. The only good characters in this place were an older lady and the prince himself. He's not the greatest, being kind of a stereotypical dumb guy, but he was better than the others.
Maeve naturally ends up being pursued by both Kian, the prince, and perhaps more surprisingly by Conchobar, the son of the man Maeve's father killed at the end of the first book. She ends up with neither, as she's still focused on Odran, her first love. When Odran's father, the asshole who killed their animals in the first book, visits Maeve's new home, he begs for her forgiveness, though it's more because he feels a goddess is punishing him for what he did than for any real remorse. Maeve learns that Odran is sick and makes a spur of the moment decision to travel by herself on foot with the falcon to go see him. Not her best idea. She does make it there and has some solid alone time with Odran, but then Friesner goes all Louisa May Alcott and just makes them...not love each other. You'd think after all the time they spent together in the first book and how heated their reunion was that they'd end up together, but no. There's really zero explanation for it. They try to use sex to continue to be together, but both of them realize they're not each other's person. Again, really weird and out of nowhere. I mean, it's like that sometimes, but there's usually a reason that's explained. Maeve decides to return home, which upsets Odran, even though he knows they have no hope. They end up journeying back with his father and Odran takes sick on the way. They get him to the nearest kingdom for aid...which happens to be Conchobar's.
Then Maeve...just now...starts freaking out that she should have sent word to her father and her fostering father that she was alive. She goes to a big meeting with Conchobar and ends up foiling a plot against her father by making up a tall tale to save everyone's ass. And everyone buys it. Maeve's father decides she deserves her own realm to rule, so she goes back to get her things from her fosterage and tell the little bitches off. But it's not nearly as good as I wanted it to be. She takes the high road too often.
So Odran returns to learn to be a healer and that romance is over. Maeve sets her falcon free and realizes she's free herself and she got there by her own hand.
These weren't awful, but I'd say they're by far the least interesting of the series. Lots of elements in them that I didn't care for.
