Maridrina is a country in a marriage alliance with the island nation of Ithicana. The heroine, Lara, is one of twelve half-sisters who are daughters of the king of Maridrina. This book comes out swinging and I was hooked right away. I would also say that the romance is the main subplot as opposed to the main plot moderate your expectations accordingly. This is very much the first book in a trilogy that follows the same characters throughout. 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). The marketing copy for this novel calls it a “fantasy romance,” but I don’t think that’s accurate.

(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.

I was squee-level excited when her Audible original fantasy novel for adults, The Bridge Kingdom, was released on Kindle earlier this year. 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. The fact that I enjoyed the book quite a lot until that point made my disappointment even more intense. 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. I keep reading books that are very hard for me to grade, because I have conflicting reactions to them. Theme: Arranged Marriage, Enemies to Lovers, Political Genre: New Adult, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy

The bridge kingdom series order