An Editor Read “The Bridge Kingdom” So You Don’t Have To.

Hello! This is u/XusBookReviews with this week’s second review of a popular book and what I thought of it. Thankfully this book isn’t as long as the last few, so I was able to make up for lost time.

As a reminder, I’m not reviewing if I *liked* the book, but what I would say if one of my clients turned this in for a professional opinion. Let’s get started!

Book Details:

Title: The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle Jensen
Series Name: The Bridge Kingdom (Book 1 of 5, so far)
Page Count: 448 pages.
Publish Date: October 16, 2018
Publisher: Del Ray Publishing

Publisher’s Plot Description: “A warrior princess trained in isolation, Lara is driven by two certainties. The first is that King Aren of the Bridge Kingdom is her enemy. And the second is that she’ll be the one to bring him to his knees. The only route through a storm-ravaged world, the Bridge Kingdom of Ithicana enriches itself and deprives its rivals, including Lara’s homeland. So when she’s sent there as a bride under the guise of peace, Lara is prepared to do whatever it takes to fracture its impenetrable defenses—and the defenses of its king.

Yet as she infiltrates her new home and gains a deeper understanding of the war to possess the bridge, Lara begins to question whether she’s the hero or the villain. As her feelings for her husband transform from frosty hostility to fierce passion, Lara must choose which kingdom she’ll save . . . and which she’ll destroy”

My Means of Reading: Kindle Paperwhite

Fantasy Style: High Fantasy

Review TLDR: After all the good reviews I’ve read and the word of mouth from friends, I am unpleasantly surprised to discover the many weaknesses of this book and its love story. Jensen has other books that I have enjoyed immensely; this book doesn’t not meet the standard those novels set. I recommend borrowing from a library or KU if it ever makes its way there, otherwise I would leave it alone.

Overall: This book has an interesting, if unoriginal premise, and does not do much to make itself stand out in terms of quality. The romance is not a thing until it suddenly is, the filler makes this book almost a third again as long as it needed to be, the FMC spends most of the story watching other people live it, the worldbuilding is contradictory, and the prose flat when it really needed not to be. I wish I had better news; I know this book is well liked in a lot of circles and I think it had a lot of promise. It just didn’t live up to the hype.

Spice Level**:** 3.5/5 – Open door, details available; Sadly, the romance in this book is one of its weakest elements. The main characters spend more than half the story not interacting at all, and when they do the conversations are on the banal side. However, there seems to be a point where a flip is switched and suddenly the FMC can’t “imagine a life without him” and the MMC is lamenting that the woman he fell in love with is a spy…except we get no indication prior to this that he was falling for her. This story jumps straight from “enemies” to “in love” with no work done to earn it. That’s right people, we have overcome the curse of “insta-lust” and found ourselves under the thrall of “of course I love him, Your Honor!” Finally, the love scene was fast and a bit by-the-numbers in its execution. Bummer.

Pacing/Filler: Another weakness to this book is the filler. My goodness is there filler. I understand wanting to make the story longer than a novella, but the amount of meaningful story hear is about novella length with the rest being there to pad the page count. At best, the pacing can be described as slow – though part of that comes from a lack of tension and meaningful emotion in the scenes that I think were meant to be significant. All that said, when Jensen hits, she hits. There is a beach battle scene that drives home the awfulness of war in a way few other authors manage. The last 25% of the book is much faster paced with minimal filler, but that doesn’t make up for the slog it takes to get there.

Character Development: The FMC, Lara, is the perfect encapsulation of a terrible trope in romantasy: the assassin who doesn’t assassinate anyone. In this case, we get told over and over again how much training/suffering she has endured to become the perfect weapon against the MMC, but when given the opportunities to use those skills, she does…nothing. Seriously, she doesn’t even make the attempt to try. This is actually true of most of Lara’s character: she’s just…there. She is largely an observer in her own story, like a mirror the reader can use to see that there is a more interesting story happening from Aren’s POV. As for Aren, he is idealistic and hopeful, to the point of doing some very dumb things, but he is constantly doing things to help the people around him. Their romance, or lack of it, I discussed above, so I won’t say much more except this: love doesn’t come in a day, but lust does and these two seem to be Jedi Masters when it comes to their powers of not feeling much at all. I usually hate it when the FMC/MMC stop to notice how hot their counterparts are, but it does need to happen with some regularity, otherwise the reader is going to assume they aren’t feeling anything.

As for the side characters, they do have character. Jor, the Captain of the Guard, in particular is a highlight. He’s gruff, but loyal and very funny. Nana is a pain in the ass as only an old, salty grandma can be. Ahnna, the princess of Ithicana, is only around for a while but is clearly there to act as the author insert – she spends a lot of time telling us what we should think of things, rather than letting the world grow organically around the reader. Actually, this is something else that annoyed me a bit about the story: no small part of the side characters’ interactions with Lara are just “Oooooo, ain’t she sassy!” and “This one has a backbone!” – show, don’t tell. And don’t make the other characters exist to hype up the FMC; that’s the FMC’s and MMC’s (eventual) job, dammit.

World Building: The author tends towards exposition dumps in the beginning and using the aforementioned author-insert Ahnna to tell us things the other characters should already know. Yet, after reading this book, I think I know more about the inside of Nana’s cabin than I do about the lore of this world. Maybe the intent is to make us feel as Lara does, totally shut in, but it leaves the world feeling empty and hollow. I found myself wanting more – like why can’t islanders who never see the bridge or its secrets leave the Bridge Kingdom? Seriously, the author stresses that the islanders know *nothing* and are being senselessly slaughtered for secrets they don’t have, but also that they know so many secrets they can never, ever leave. Doesn’t add up does it?

There is also the “characters act like idiots to move the plot forward” element. There are a few instances of this, but the most egregious is when the author decides she wants Lara to know the truth and the only way to do it is to have Aren has to sneak himself and his top lieutenants into enemy territory, return an at-least-strongly-suspected-royal-spy back into her own turf, and not tell anyone that he's taking that risk. There had to have been other ways for Lara to get to the big reveal, but Jensen couldn’t think of anything better than to have her MMC do something wildly out of character. After all, aren’t his people forbidden on pain-of-death from leaving the country?

Obvious Errors an Author/Editor Should Have Caught: There are no misspellings, no improper word choices, and while I find the author’s writing to be a tad over-descriptive, that can be chalked up to preference more than anything. Part of me does wonder if that comes from this book being published before AI came in and convinced our corporate overlords that they don’t need to “waste” money on editors and copywriters.

My only real complaint about the writing comes from the, for lack of a better term, flatness of the prose. Scenes that were clearly meant to have tension don’t – at one point the FMC and MMC play cards for honest answers to questions, which should have been scary for the FMC, but nothing comes of it and neither character says anything that gives the reader even mild anxiety. The traditional “who did this to you??” question comes off as “meh” and the injuries are never thought of again. I think it comes from a lot of the story being in Lara’s head, and it’s the same thoughts over and over and over again: “Ithicana bad, home country good, must betray Aren as soon as possible.” Except she doesn’t do it. She doesn’t even make an attempt to do it. Which makes the constant mantra of “Ithicana Bad, Home Good, Betray Aren Now” feel repetitive and dull. I think an editor could have been a touch more ruthless with the organizing of this novel, and pushed the author to cut out some of the filler to create a more “heightened” atmosphere.

Bechdel Test Survivor: It does indeed pass, though I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that about 70% of conversations between women were just Lara asking “where is Aren?” and “Where did Aren go?” She does spend time doing other things, though, so it does pass.

Content Warnings: Murder, torture.

Is the FMC/MMC Unfaithful: They are not. That comes mostly from them spending most of the book not in a relationship to be unfaithful to, so prepare for a sloooow-burn.

Previously Reviewed: The Second Death of Locke by V.L. Bovalino

Next Review Is: Quicksilver by Callie Hart