Honest Book Review of The Bridge Kingdom
Author: Danielle L. Jensen
Some of the links on this blog are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you make a purchase. This helps support the blog at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support! Click to read my Disclaimers for more info.
I had a really good time with The Bridge Kingdom. This is one of those fantasy romances where the romance is important, but the political scheming is doing some heavy lifting too. Enemies to lovers at it’s finest.
Lara is sent to infiltrate her enemy’s kingdom through marriage, which sounds stressful enough without also catching feelings along the way. I loved watching her try to figure out who was lying, who was manipulating her, and whether everything she’d been taught her entire life was actually true. Spoiler: things get messy. Very messy.
The romance is a slow burn, which worked for me because it gave the relationship time to develop naturally. Aren isn’t your typical shadow daddy, but he won me over pretty quickly. The real star of the show, though, was the tension. Every conversation felt like someone was holding a knife behind their back while smiling politely. I never fully trusted anyone, which honestly felt like the correct reading experience.
This landed at 4 stars for me because the middle dragged a little in places, and I wanted a bit more emotional punch from some of the bigger moments. But overall, I flew through it and immediately understood why so many fantasy romance readers love this series. If you enjoy political intrigue, enemies-to-lovers vibes, betrayals, secret agendas, and characters making increasingly complicated life choices, The Bridge Kingdom is definitely worth picking up. Just don’t get too comfortable trusting anyone. They’re probably hiding something.
Officially making plans to read Danielle Jensen’s backlog of fantasy books
Officially released is her new book A Fate Inked in Blood! Check out my honest book review!
You've Been Warned.
Everything below contains major spoilers, plot twists, betrayals, and emotional damage.
There was one point in this story that 90% of me was thinking to myself “This is a little too happy.” Then WHAM crap hits the fan and Danielle pulls the rug from underneath you and gives you a solid ending.
This book literally started out with Lara killing all of her sisters. Yep. She did that. When Lara found out that her cruel father or king of Methicana was going to kill everyone except one sister who wasn’t Lara. Lara decided to show how ruthless she is by killing all of her sisters which forced the king to choose her to be the queen in the arranged marriage.
Now a little background on Lara and her sisters, she was literally raised to be an assassin for this terrible father of theirs. Not sure why the father wanted to kill all twelve (I think that’s the number) of them. Because personally, he could have used them to carry out other evil plans that he had. I am not an evil king, so how would I know how to be evil? Anyways.
Since Lara was raised to be an assassin, her mission was to woo the king of the Bridge Kingdom, get all the secrets of the Bridge Kingdom, and give them to the ruthless king. Lara did get a little smart in this, she bartered for her freedom in exchange for getting the information.
Lara got lucky in this arranged marriage. King Aren of the Bridge Kingdom is dashingly handsome. He is also kind and really cares about protecting his country. Not just ruling but also fighting alongside his people.
Lara wasn’t expecting that side of Aren. She was raised her whole life to hate this kingdom and believe that they were cruel.
You slowly see Lara learn that the ruthless king was lying to her quite a lot and discover what side she wants to fight for.
The romance in this was intense. There was certainly chemistry in this book that was a lot of pushing and pulling. You see Aren falling for Lara but he isn’t stupid. He picked up quickly that Lara was a spy and did his due diligence in confirming it. Once confirmed, he was even willing to kill Lara to protect his country. The very loyal guy that he is.
The only thing that got me a little in this book is between 60-80%. Nothing was really happening. The story was going through some mundane points of the book and it wasn’t really exciting and leaning more towards the boring. It was frustrating to see the indecisiveness of Lara throughout this as well. There were moments where she would do something that was exciting and all of a sudden the story changed gear and she did nothing. I wanted to yell at her…”JUST DO SOMETHING ALREADY”
This was a cool story. The FMC is really tough as nuts and is a BA in this. Not just all bark and no bite. Our FMC Lara can fight without hesitation. Without hesitation, she killed her sister who survived because she was a threat. Usually in fantasy books, there would be long conversations the MC having a long internal battle of whether she could kill her or not, and then have ravaged guilt afterwards. Not this FMC. Thank goodness. Even though it was her closet sister, she did what she had to and moved on.
I do wish I saw more of her assassin abilities in this one but there is a good chance I will see it in the next book in this series as she now has to go save a King.
I cannot wait to read the next one because The Bridge Kingdom slightly left me hanging at the end.
This book is available on Kindle Unlimited! Go check it out!
