The Enemy’s Daughter by Melissa Poett – Review

Published: May 6, 2025

Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult

Pages: 363 (Kindle)

My Rating: 3 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

Synopsis:
A stunning reimagining of Tristan and Isolde set in a dystopian world woven with magic. An addictive debut YA enemies-to-lovers romantasy—perfect for fans of Rebecca Ross and Sarah Underwood as well as books like Curious Tides, The Hurricane Wars, and Belladonna.

It’s been thirty-seven years since the Republic was destroyed. Now two settlements—the five clans and the Kingsland—fight for control of the untainted land. Though the five clans are outnumbered, they’ve finally struck, killing Kingsland’s brutal leader.

In the war that follows, Isadora, an eighteen-year-old healer, risks her life to help injured soldiers. But when she stops an attack from Tristan, a Kingsland assassin, his soldiers shoot her with a poisoned arrow. As Isadora lies dying, Tristan does the unimaginable: He offers to save her life using a rare magic.

In choosing to live, Isadora is unknowingly bound to the mysterious Tristan. Worse, even acknowledging the attraction between them allows him to glean fragments of her memories and the very knowledge he needs to destroy the five clans. But their magical connection works both ways. So to save her people, Isadora will have to open her heart to her most cunning enemy. Because in a race for ultimate survival, she’ll need to destroy Tristan and his people first.

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I don’t pick up many young adult fantasy books anymore and even more rarely do I pick up a young adult fantasy romance. The Enemy’s Daughter is a Tristan and Isolde retelling, which is what ultimately sold me on it. I like the forbidden love aspect of that tale and the idea of a dystopian version of the story sounded interesting.

The Enemy’s Daughter is set nearly 40 years after what seems to have been a large-scale nuclear bombing that tainted the land and resulted in the crumbling of society. Groups of survivors banded together and formed two major groups in this story – the inhabitants of Kingsland and the clans. Isadora is a healer and daughter to the Saraf, leader of the five clans, a group of people living primitively, eschewing the knowledge of the old, destroyed society. It’s patriarchal and the women are expected to keep to the villages where they can be ‘kept safe’ while the men hunt and fight. As the story kicks off, Isadora is being offered as the bride to whichever clan leader can kill the leader of Kingsland. Before she can be wed, Isadora is shot with a poisoned arrow and whisked away to Kingsland where they save her life with a secret magic. 

As Isadora heals and learns more about Kingsland, which is a much more advanced town that utilizes the remnants of the fallen society, she begins to question what she’s been taught her whole life. There’s enough internal strife in this book for a whole village. She is falling for Tristan, but he’s the enemy. The Kingslanders seem to be keeping tech and things like electricity and plumbing from the clans, but also the clans reject anything from the previous society and deem it corrupt. She wants to stay, but she also should leave and tell her father about the settlement. To make it even more complicated, when Tristan saved Isadora from the poisoned arrow he formed a magical bond with her that allows them to share feelings and memories. On one hand, she could use this to get valuable information and on the other she enjoys the sense of closeness it brings as she begins to fall for him.

This book has a lot of elements that I liked as pieces, but as a whole it didn’t quite work for me. First of all, worldbuilding is just too underdeveloped. I didn’t care much about the clans and while I found the Kingslanders interesting, I really just wanted to know more about the past and why society was destroyed. For goodness sake, there are people living on both sides that were working adults when it all happened! What was so corrupt that it was preferable to live like it’s the 1700s? How did certain families of the Kingslanders get this magical bond? Was it the radiation? Additionally, I just didn’t get invested in the relationship between Isadora and Tristan. I know the bond was supposed to make things move a bit more quickly, so I can see the insta-infatuation but there really wasn’t any chemistry or enough yearning. Overall, this story had a lot of cool ideas and it was a quick, fun read but ultimately I found it to be just okay.