About.com Rating
Julie Kagawa's fan-favorite series The Iron Fey begins with this book, The Iron King. The story deftly combines old folklore with contemporary technology for an engrossing tale of family and belonging -- with a nice undercurrent of potential romance.
Publication Information
- Full Title:The Iron King
- Series: The Iron Fey (#1)
- Author: Julie Kagawa
- Publisher: Harlequin Teen
- Publication Date: 2010
- ISBN: 978-0-373-21008-4 (paperback), 978-1-426-84780-6 (ebook), B002WEPDLS (Kindle ASIN)
Not As It Seems
Meghan Chase is a misfit. Her family is poor and she lives on a farm, making her different from most of the kids she goes to school with. Her best friend is the school joker, her mother is remarried after Meghan's father went missing, and her stepfather always seems surprised at her existence. Her little brother Ethan is smarter than a kid his ages should be, and adores Meghan.
When Ethan is kidnapped -- and something not human is left in his place -- Meghan learns that her best friend isn't exactly human either, and neither is she. What she discovers when she enters the Nevernever to find Ethan and bring him home is beyond anything she ever dreamed.
More Than It Appears
As a huge fan of fiction that incorporates faery lore, I can be a bit picky about books like The Iron King. But at the same time, I love to see how each author uses traditional elements in their stories, which bits of folklore they choose, which they ignore, and how they integrate those old bits of story into their own tale.
Julie Kagawa seems to have done a lot of research into traditional Celtic faery lore and there are plenty of familiar themes and elements from the old stories in The Iron King. But at the same time, teen readers will recognize their own context here, with its school computer labs, cell phones, and iPods. The two -- traditional and contemporary -- could easily clash, but Kagawa has integrated them seamlessly.
I especially loved how the old faery aversion to iron, found in many of the oldest Celtic faery tales, has been given an interesting twist. Iron wards off the faery folk, but it's also the basis for human technology, and thus a new source of human dreams and imagination, which in turn give life to magic -- and faeries.
Full of Character
One thing Kagawa does well is characterization. Her characters are always well-drawn and three-dimensional -- I noticed this in The Immortal Rules, too. They have enough quirks to make them interesting and enough depth to make them believable. Even the villains have understandable -- if not forgivable -- motivations.
Plot-wise, The Iron King is, at first glance, a straightforward quest tale. Ethan gets kidnapped, and Meghan goes to rescue him. But it is also a secret destiny tale, where our hero begins as a seemingly ordinary person who finds out they're not ordinary at all. It would be very easy for such a story to become predictable, and in some ways it is. But those excellent characters mean that there are unexpected twists and zigzags that keep the predictability to a minimum and the "what happens next?" factor high.
There And Back Again
Because The Iron King is the first book in a series, naturally there are things left unfinished at the end, ways for the story to keep going. But all the main action is tied up and comes to a satisfying conclusion. And though I have no intention of stopping the series here, I could do so and not feel like I'd stepped out of the story partway through.
It's nice when a series opener makes you feel like you could stop reading at the end if you want to, but also makes you really want to continue to the next volume. The Iron King does just that, and I'll be picking up book 2 as soon as I can.
Disclosure: A review copy was purchased by the reviewer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.