Antonia Bernardin

The Twisted Throne by Danielle L Jensen is the 5th book in The Bridge Kingdom series and was my 84th read of 2024.

You can read my review of Book 4 ‘The Endless War‘ here. Sadly, I read the others when I was less consistent with my reviews, so they aren’t on here! As we are quite far down the series there will potentially be spoilers for earlier books in the plot summary.

All the books are split out into duologues, this book is the start of a different character’s journey.

A vague plot summary

This book follows Ahnna, the sister of the male main character in book 1 of the series. It picks up the narrative relatively soon after the end of book 4, except now we are back in Inthicana as Ahnna prepares to make her voyage to Herondele, to fulfil the terms of the treaty drawn up by her mother when she was a child. Except just as the escort arrives, they are ambushed by Meridrina and Ahnna finds herself saving the life of her future husband… or so she thinks. It turns out to be his brother, the bastard son of the king and captain of his armies.

Through their journey to the infamous Sky palace and in her early days there, Ahnna is attacked repeatedly but her attackers seems suspiciously interested in her handsome guard. Ahhna came to Herondele to escape what she sees as her failures in the war brought to her shores by the wife his brother has chosen to forgive but she finds herself in the midst of a war she doesn’t know how to fight, made up of whispered words, poison and shadowy plots. All she wants to do is negotiate a better future for her people but everything she does seems to make things worse and she finds her feelings growing for the wrong brother, who seems to have agenda of his own that Ahnna can’t figure out. At the very least the King seems to be on her side and wants her as the future Queen of Herondele, but the King is also plotting something that even his favourite son doesn’t know about.

My review

So I will be honest and say that I found the first half of this book a little slow, it’s definitely one that builds the tension piece by piece as Ahnna tries to figure things out. I think the characters in these books are always incredibly well written but I’ll admit, I could not figure out who was the enemy throughout the whole book. At least we get a bit of James’s POV so we know what he is planning, but that only serves to confuse things more. The king seems so trustworthy, the Queen seems evil and then somehow tragic, you feel genuinely sorry for her and the sister comes across as a spoilt cruel princess and the prince she’s betrothed to as a spoilt drunk but none of them are exactly what they seem.

The ending though?! When I tell you I literally gasped aloud, I’m not exaggerating. The way the strings all pulled together is fucking genius and I did not see it coming, but not in it-wasn’t-well-foreshadowed-in the plot way, more like I know I’ll find a lot of crumbs on a re-read.

This book definitely has a lot more political machinations than outright war, and the landscape in this book whilst vivid, isn’t such a character in itself as Ithicana is in the first two.