The Forest King's Daughter

Almost nothing in this book worked for me. Cassia is bland, the relationship doesn't exist, the plot and world are full of holes. By the end I was just skimming to see how it played out, and even that wasn't interesting.

There's something about enemies-to-lovers books that just keep me coming back to the trope. What I like even more is when the characters have history – where they're friends before and then something happens to turn them into enemies. But as they're (begrudgingly) spending time with each other years later... that hatred slowly turns into something else. Listen, it's just good every time. And that was certainly true here. Cassia and Zeru had that in spades. Their species, not to mention their families were at odds and total enemies. Of course, you know what happened – we all know what happens in an enemies-to-lovers book. What changes is the journey – how they went from wanting to kill each other to kiss.

The characters were well-written and developed well alongside the plot – I thought Blake did that well. Both, however, were quite slow-paced. I don't have an issue with slow-paced books in the slightest but it felt like the book wanted to be paced faster and the developments were slowing it down. Now and then the book seemed to be at a faster pace and then it would just slow down like the author remembered she wanted it to be slow. Though with slow-paced books there's more time to slowly develop everything – which happened here. We slowly got to know the characters, their motivations, their personalities, and their stories all develop.

We also got a slow romance, which was nice, even though I wanted it to speed up at times. Cassia and Zeru complement each other and it'll be interesting to see where they go from here – what they do and how they face the dangers together. Of course, and how they grow more in love with each other – because they are quite cute together. I liked how their relationship tied in so well with the plot – I like when that happens and when the author does it well. Still I would've liked the pacing of the romance to have been faster, but like I said earlier – it didn't deter me from liking it.

The plot was largely about secrets and the histories of the two species – which wasn't handled like it could've been. I think what added to it was the constant feeling of the book being a debut novel. Then I found out the author has a whole other series aka very much not a debut book. But the feeling that it was still stayed. Of course I'm not saying that debut novels are bad in any way – just that this book seemed like it was Blake's debut. I have no idea what the other two books will be about (as it's a trilogy) as I thought the book did well as a standalone) but we'll see when those books come out. Maybe about the other sisters?