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This book gets 1.5 stars for the few redeeming qualities that it had.

I'll start out by saying that I absolutely LOVED American Royals and was very excited for this sequel. After reading it though, I kind of wished I'd just stuck with the first one. The first one's ending genuinely felt more satisfying than Majesty's did.

To the spoiler-y part of the review:

Literally every single relationship gets flip-flopped in this book. I don't understand why the author would spend an entire book building up relationships and developing the characters within them only to turn around and completely negate every single one? It honestly felt like the first book hadn't even happened; pretty much the only plot point from AR that affected Majesty was that the king had died.

To the characters individually:
1. Beatrice - I adored Bee in the first book, she was my favorite character by a mile. Her struggle between doing what was expected of her and doing what she felt was right was so interesting and I think very timely for a 21-year-old girl. She had such pressure on her from her parents and the country, her siblings were garbage to her (especially Sam, we'll get to her in a minute), and at her core I think she was a deeply lonely person. Through her friendship and eventual romantic relationship with Connor, however, she seemed to really start to work through that balancing act of being both the heir to the throne and a human being. Then that was all turned on its head in Majesty - Bee basically shoves Connor out of her life after agreeing to marry Teddy anyway for political reasons, and then proceeds to "fall in love" with Teddy (the guy who just a few weeks ago was very into her sister). No part of Bee and Teddy's relationship felt authentic, and there were a lot of things about Teddy that really bothered me that were never addressed (why is no one talking about him essentially gold-digging? You'd think at least Queen Adelaide would have been concerned, but she's hardly around). Comparing Bee's thoughts/feelings during her time with Connor to her thoughts/feelings for Teddy feels like night and day. Honestly, it felt more like a schoolgirl crush on Teddy than it felt like actual 'I want to spend the rest of my life with you' love. (I have many issues with Teddy as a character too, but this review would end up 12 pages long). After AR did such a great job of describing all of Bee's emotions, the only real spark of personality we get out Bee this whole book is when Daphne tries to blackmail her. She seemed so out of character to me this entire book.

2. Samantha - Sam actually wasn't as insufferable as she was in the first book. However, after her and Bee reconciling over mac 'n cheese in AR, I was shocked that she spent the first 90% of Majesty back to hating her sister and not speaking to her. Again, what was the point of her and Bee's relationship development in the first book if they were just going to go back to square one? Her relationship with Marshall was cute enough that I wasn't bothered by it, but I also felt that her insistence that she had genuine feelings for Teddy in the first book again fell flat due to her falling for another guy so quickly.

3. Nina - Nina genuinely didn't affect the story in any way in this one. I like her, and she's an interesting character, but she had very little interaction with anyone outside of Ethan. Jefferson was basically nonexistent in Majesty (I don't think he and Bee ever even interact, and he only has one actual scene with Sam I think). She was a nice foil in AR to the royals, and I loved that she told Sam like it is, but her character just didn't have much to do in this one.

4. Daphne - Scheming and sociopathic as ever, Daphne was actually more entertaining to read in Majesty than I thought she was in AR. However, she neither gets her comeuppance nor learns anything from her actions, so it again felt like there wasn't a real purpose to her story being there. Jeff remains with his head up his ass, so who knows where that relationship will end up.

I also think this book, for ostensibly being about Beatrice becoming queen and how that affects everyone, focused a little too much on the romances and not enough on the political drama. I could ask Katharine a million questions about the way this world works - for instance, if Bee has equivalent powers to the president in our world (such as being commander in chief and setting foreign policy), then why in the world does she never seem to actually do any work? I almost feel like this was supposed to be a trilogy or even a longer series and the author got cut off by the publisher and had to retconn an ending in the same way TV writers have to deal with sudden cancellations.

There was a slight glimmer of hope at the end of this one, but overall it just fell flat.