Background: I am a 41 year old female who is new to Lego - in fact, I have been getting sets for only about 2 weeks now. I have amassed a small collection of minifigs and smaller sets pretty quickly because I don't have kids, I have disposable income, and time alone in the evening waiting for my husband to get home from work (he gets home later than I do)!

This was the second set I built. I actually have a Minecraft set that sat in the box for over a year because I was a bit intimidated by the tinyness and quantity of parts. I never had Lego as child - my parents said they were too expensive.

One night, being bored and home alone while the husbeast was working, I decided to go to Walgreens and buy stupid things. I checked out the toy aisle, and spotted a few small Friends sets. I had read some articles recently about toys and gender segregation, and whether the Friends line tends to isolate play by girls. You can go Google the articles and arguments. I was curious to see just how girly they are, and so I picked up this set and a Olivia's Beach Buggy so I could begin to judge for myself.

Box/Instructions

The packaging was a plastic bag, rather than a box. I threw it away.

Instructions were fine, as I mentioned with the Beach Buggy set, as a new Lego-er, I found the instructions very clear, and was able to very easily follow them to put the set together. As someone who sometimes writes documentation in my day job, I was actually pretty impressed at how clear they are without any text, with only images.

Parts

I have discovered that if you give me parts to make a tree in a set, I'm pretty happy.

The deer is cute, but the hole for the infernal bow is distracting to me. There's a very pink bowl, and some cherries.

Speaking of bows, it comes with so many spares! And more Friends sets result in more bows. They are like bacteria in a petri dish. Not a fan of the bows.

Lastly, the mushroom! Mushroom! I adore the mushroom, it's one of my favorite Lego things.

Minifigures

I don't think animals count as figures. There are no Friends figures or minifigures included with this set.

The build

I'm a simple woman. I love trees! I think the use of the Technic block as a knothole in the tree is so great. I really enjoyed seeing it come together. But that's pretty much the whole build - if you don't like building trees. you won't like this set.

The completed model

A blossoming tree, a mushroom, a fawn, and a dish that's randomly attached to a loose branch. It's a small set, but priced pretty fairly if you like trees.

Overall opinion

Pink factor: Fairly low, if you don't use the bows. The bowl is a bit obnoxious. The tree has some pink button bits that I am assuming are cherry blossoms, and a couple of random yellow flowers. Pink flowers on a cherry tree make sense.

Not sure why a cherry tree would have random yellow flowers. I am pretending they are shelf fungi.

I liked this one enough to go back and get another copy of the set. It's nice to have more than one tree, I coveted more mushrooms, and an extra fawn isn't too shabby either for some future forest scenario build. Between this build and the Olivia's Buggy set, I had enough fun that it inspired me to open up the Minecraft set I had in the box for over a year and put it together. It helped convince me to become a Lego collector. So, thumbs up!

Set #41023 Fawn's Forest: From Animals Series 3 we receive a brand new animal piece in the Fawn, it's a very cute little animal that looks great with the rest of the Friends animals, it'll also make a great piece for any Snow White sets in the future Disney Princess Theme.

Pros

• The Fawn is a new animal sculpt that looks adorable.
• The tree build is quite satisfying, the design looks great and the added stud blossoms really make this Animal Set model stand out as something cute and fun.
• The cherries return.

Cons

• A fawn should not have bows to wear, I mean I get that LEGO wants something to include as an 'accessory' for the animals, but wild animals are not going to let you attach bows on them in real life. That and it looks stupid where they place the hole.
• The tree is a great and wonderful build, it is also a bit on the short side. Could stand to be just slightly taller I think for proper scaling with the Fawn.

Honestly I think this is a pretty decent Animal set from the Friends Theme, it looks great and I love how consistent they are when adding Mushrooms to any LEGO sets with mushrooms, they all have the same design and printed pieces so they all look like they could be part of the exact same forest if you wanted to put them all together. (Case in point this displays well next to the brilliant looking Tree House set from 2012.)

The huge bow stuck on the fawn's rear end does look very out of place, if they wanted a bow on her tail just add it as a painted detail. Still strongly recommend this as a great stocking stuffer this year.