Additionally, the romance between Ash and Meghan seemed rushed. None of the characters struck me offensively bad in any way, but none of them felt fully fleshed out. There’s a love triangle, because this was published in 2010 and those were required in your YA novel back then, and some side characters that were never truly developed. Puck is playful and mischievous while Ash is broody and dark. Puck does, though, and so does Ash, prince of the Winter/Unseelie Court. Oberon and Titania don’t have much weight on the narrative. From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Aside from Meghan, there’s Robbie, whose full name is Robin Goodfellow. Meghan is immune to iron, which is toxic to faeries, and she has some incredible power that isn’t quite explained. As it turns out, Meghan is half-fey and her father is Oberon, king of the Summer/Seelie Court.
Meghan insists she’s not like “other girls” all the time, which grated on my nerves, and of course she had some special destiny that she never knew about until 100 pages into the book.
No one spectacular by my standards, but indicative of the trends in YA at the time. I remember liking the book, maybe not loving it, but upon this reread, I’ve definitely picked up on a few things I’d missed.įirstly, there are the characters. This was my junior year of high school and I was firmly entrenched in the paranormal romance trend that had so thoroughly enraptured the YA genre. I first read The Iron King when it was published in 2010. Knowing she is the only one who can save him, Meghan follows Ethan and his captors into a place called the Nevernever, where she must battle not just the faeries that inhabit it, but her own heart as well. On the day of her sixteenth birthday, Meghan’s bleak, yet normal life gets turned upside-down when Ethan is kidnapped replaced by a faerie changeling. Her only friend, Robbie, comes with his own quirks, and her half-brother, Ethan, seems to be the only member of her family who can actually remember her. At school, she’s bullied, at home, she’s forgotten. The Iron King follows sixteen-year-old Meghan Chase, who never quite feels like she belongs. Like Holly Black, Melissa Marr, and Aprilynne Pike, Julie Kagawa threw her hat in the fairy ring with The Iron King. There were vampires, of course, and some werewolves thrown in there for good measure, but a distinct branch of the paranormal romance craze in YA belonged to the Fair Folk. This is important to note because the massive success of the Twilight series busted the young adult world wide open, ushering in dozens of attempts to fill the Edward Cullen-shaped hole in readers’ hearts. The Iron King by Julie Kagawa came out in 2010, just five years after the publication of the first Twilight novel, and two years before the movie adaptation. THE IRON KING (The Iron Fey #1) by JULIE KAGAWA (2010)
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