I keep reading books that are very hard for me to grade, because I have conflicting reactions to them. The Bridge Kingdom started out incredibly strong, but things that happened in the last 15% or so of the book soured the reading experience for me. The fact that I enjoyed the book quite a lot until that point made my disappointment even more intense.

I’ve been a fan of Danielle L. Jensen since her debut novel, Stolen Songbird, which is about a beautiful songstress who is stolen away to live under a mountain with trolls and gets married to a very dreamy troll prince. I was squee-level excited when her Audible original fantasy novel for adults, The Bridge Kingdom, was released on Kindle earlier this year. (I’m not sure why, because I do like podcasts, but I don’t like audiobooks very much.) Since romance fantasy is not thick on the ground, I will Hoover up anything that even seems subgenre-adjacent.

The marketing copy for this novel calls it a “fantasy romance,” but I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s definitely a fantasy novel with romantic elements as opposed to an actual fantasy romance, so don’t go in looking for a resolution of the romantic plot (or a resolution of the plot, period). This is very much the first book in a trilogy that follows the same characters throughout. I would also say that the romance is the main subplot as opposed to the main plot; moderate your expectations accordingly.

This book comes out swinging and I was hooked right away. The heroine, Lara, is one of twelve half-sisters who are daughters of the king of Maridrina. Maridrina is a country in a marriage alliance with the island nation of Ithicana. Lara and her sisters were trained to be spies so that the one who eventually cemented the marriage alliance could figure out Ithicana’s secrets to facilitate an eventual invasion.

In the first few pages of the book, Lara poisons all her sisters to ensure that she will be the one sent to Ithicana. To be clear, she does not poison them to death. Just enough to make the king think they are dead, so he doesn’t kill them himself. How badass is that?! She ensures that she will be the one chosen to go to Ithicana both to grant her sisters their freedom and because she is a little bit of a zealot who would do pretty much anything to end the famine in her country.

Lara was far and away the highlight of the book for me. She’s complicated. She’s ruthless, but fiercely protective with a keen sense of justice that she’s willing to put aside to serve a greater cause. Strategic but impulsive. A survivalist who is willing to sacrifice herself if necessary.

She thinks early on in the book,

Their father believed that brilliance and beauty were the most important attributes in the daughter he’d select. That she be the girl who’d shown the most acumen for combat and strategy. The girl who’d shown the most talent in the arts of the bedroom. He’d thought he’d know which traits mattered most—but he’d forgotten one.

Lara does not explicitly clarify what this trait is, but it’s clear from context that it’s her WHATEVER IT TAKES attitude. I would put Lara up there with, like, Phèdre from the Kushiel series or Lila Bard from A Darker Shade of Magic with my favorite fantasy heroines, were it not for my MAJOR quibble with the final segment of this book (more on that later).

Other than Lara, I also appreciated the world-building in this book. Ithicana is known as the bridge kingdom because it’s an island chain in between two continents, and spanning the islands is a giant, quasi-mystical bridge. I say quasi-mystical because while it is not explicitly magic, it also seems like no one knows who built it, or when, or how, and it does not appear subject to any kind of environmental degradation or decay. The bridge means that Ithicana basically controls intercontinental trade. Obviously, all of the larger nations around Ithicana want to conquer the country so they can use the bridge with impunity (and get revenue from the bridge tolls). Ithicana is protected by 1) a long and intense storm season that makes land invasion impossible most of the time and 2) a level of secrecy so intense it makes the CIA look like amateur hour. Also, man-eating sharks.

The intricacies of the bridge and how Ithicana survives were hugely interesting, as were the larger political machinations between the various nations in the book. In a certain sense, this book is like a mystery, but the mystery to be solved is Ithicana itself. I, personally, love the sense of figuring out an intricately built world in fantasy, so this aspect worked for me.

Since this is at least nominally a romantic fantasy, I should probably also talk about the hero and the romance. The hero, Aren, is the king of the titular bridge kingdom. He is fine, if a bit generic. His main characteristics seem to be being handsome and being a good person. He likes to take risks to feel alive. Also, he’s very martial. Nothing about him bothered me, but he didn’t stir my soul either. (Did I find myself fantasizing a little bit about what this book would have been like if Lara had fallen in love with Ahnna, Aren’s badass sister, instead? YES. YES I DID). Admittedly, it takes a lot for me to be impressed by a hero, since I’m feeling kind of over men in general right now, so YMMV. He’s whatever. I was too goo-goo eyed over Lara to care.

The romance is also perfectly enjoyable if not my particular cup of tea pacing-wise. It’s very much a slow burn early on, but when it does burn, it goes from zero to one hundred very quickly. (Am I talking about sex? Yes, I am. With the exception of one somewhat spicy early-book scene, we jump right from many scenes fantasizing-about-touching-without-actual-touching straight into the BONE ZONE.) I generally like things to ramp up at a steadier pace. Nonetheless, I liked the cat-and-mouse game between the politically opposed protagonists juxtaposed alongside their growing understanding of and appreciation for each other as people.

So I’ve talked about the things that were really good, and the things that were fine, and now I have to talk about the things that irked me.

The first is relatively minor, and it’s a complaint you will notice I have a lot if you have been reading my reviews. The antagonists of this book are one-dimensional. The initial setup of the conflict suggests that the survival of Lara’s people would come at least in some way at the cost of the survival of Aren’s people, and vice versa. I found Lara grappling with this conflict, and the question of whom she owes her loyalty to, captivating. In this initial setup, while Lara’s dad, the king, is not a great person (he was on board to kill, like, a lot of his own children), he appears to genuinely believe that what he is doing is the only way to save his people.

Unfortunately, as the book goes on, the conflict becomes dramatically simplified by the fact that

The second thing that bothered me knocked this book at least an entire letter grade for me, because it was so frustrating it almost ruined my enjoyment of the rest of the story. It was a plot contrivance that was incredibly obvious and completely illogical and out of character all at once. The basic gist is this: there’s a Chekov’s gun-style situation introduced in the first half of the book that the reader knows is going to blow up later. I spent the entire book dreading its appearance and hoping that my expectations would be subverted. Instead, the execution irritated me more than I thought possible. Without getting too spoiler-y but inevitably getting a little spoiler-y:

What was even more bothersome to me than the illogic of this decision was that it was enormously out of character. We are shown throughout the book that Lara, though ruthless, can be incredibly self-sacrificing in the service of a just cause. She sacrifices herself to a political marriage to save her sisters. She is willing to risk her happiness, freedom, and even her life to save the people of her country.

Especially because I found Lara to be such a consistent and vivid heroine otherwise, this glaring inconsistency with everything else we had been shown about her throughout the book was maddening.

After the entire situation blows up very near the end of the book, everything quickly goes to complete shambles. There is almost no plot resolution of any kind and the last chapters are basically just a rushed parade of Bad Shit Happening. All of the bad shit is clearly setting up the rest of the trilogy and Lara’s inevitable rise from the ashes of this turd pile. However, given that the way that all of this adversity happened felt very artificial, and that it messes pretty hard with the pacing, the end of this book was a huge letdown.

So where does this all leave us? I enjoyed most of my reading experience with this book, and I think it had many good qualities. I (mostly) loved the heroine and the world-building was vivid and compelling. But at the same time, I have trouble giving it a strong recommendation because the last 15% or so of this book was so incredibly frustrating. It feels kind of like recommending a delicious cookie that I, personally, know has a bug baked into it that you won’t discover until the last bite. At the very least, I would recommend waiting to read this book until the sequel comes out, so you don’t have to end your reading experience on an extremely sour cliffhanger note like I did.