Lord of the Wilds is a clear case of a debut. You have a mostly well-rounded main character, an interesting setting and a lot of potential, alas the execution... is not really there yet.
Starting from the description itself, the plot is all over the place:
"She convinces him that she will risk her life for wealth, but really she’s after the one thing the Fae covet above magic of her own."
She does not just convince him, but also herself and by extension us, the readers. For the longest while, she keeps harping how this is all a big sacrifice as to get help to her village, which is a valiant cause and absolutely understandable, until at some point she confesses to herself that she always wanted magic and this is what it is about. Not at any point of the story up until then had she shown any interest in her possessing magic (other than vague thinking about it, which is normal considering where she lives), but apparently it is important enough.
"As Lore navigates the hostile world outside, she’s forced to rely on two Fae males to survive."
For the longest time again, I was wondering who those 2 males were, because the 2nd male appeared in the 2nd half of the book... You cannot really put it as a main plot point when it happens so much later and it does not have time to blossom to a good story, which it doesn't, of course. Those things are just rookie mistakes when you have so many ideas, but you cannot make them flow together.
Following up on those 2 males... they do not make much sense whatsoever. Apart from what feels like Lore basically just falling for anyone who speaks to her for more than 5 minutes (except her childhood friend, apparently), the 2 fae have little reason liking her as much as they did. The first guy's, Asher, meeting with her is just so weirdly set-up that even if he was truly curious about humans, it makes little sense how far he went to be with her when they had exchanged maybe 4 lines to each other. However, the weird thing is that the author really tried to show that Lore was still suspicious about things, but it just never really worked. I kept waiting to see more development on his part, but...
After Asher, Lore either will meet best friends or cartoonish baddies and everyone made more sense than Asher himself. He gets her to meet some friends of his and there we see Finn, who hates Asher for some inexplicable reason. Again, I was hoping for this to be explained properly, but... no. Finn is your average moody guy, who turns more emo when Asher is around. At this point, I would think Finn liked him and was just too shy to show it, but... no.
You just know that those 2 guys are just there for some weird love triangle that Lore almost finds super normal and even finds weird how 1 of them is not okay to just be close to each other while she is making out with the other guy. The whole thing is just badly written, unfortunately and made as someone's fantasy. I know, because I have written bad romance which sounded so perfect in my head but not so much on paper, haha.
Apart from the romantic escapades, the story/settings develops in a normal pace, but around at 2/3 of the book, pace just goes haywire. Author has spent so much time writing about Lore's everyday life (which was very welcome) and then the story just jumps around. There is literally a part where she infiltrates a palace in just a few pages with almost no detail. This is another rookie mistake; you just want to focus on the more important parts and you just rush through events you don't care about (but are very important development-wise) so you can write the juicy stuff.
