Book Review: The Iron King, by Julie Kagawa

Photo by Eamon Curry

Meghan Chase is not particularly excited about her sixteenth birthday. She doesn't expect her mother and stepfather to remember it, and she only has one friend at school, where she has never fitted in. But when she gets home, she finds her mother, bleeding and unconscious, and her brother Ethan is no longer the sweet, loving child that he has always been. She quickly learns that the child in the house is not Ethan at all but a faery changeling, and that she doesn't have much time to find Ethan and bring him home.

I had read a couple of reviews of Julie Kagawa's books before but only picked up The Iron King after I was given a copy at the MIRA Ink Blogger Party, where there was a live video call with Julie Kagawa. All the other bloggers there were thrilled and she came across as a really nice, friendly person so I knew I would have to read it before the year was out.

At first I found it a bit difficult to get into The Iron King. The story didn't immediately grab me the way that Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tale series did, and I found Meghan a little frustrating as she so easily accepted the meagre information that other characters gave to her about what she was getting herself into. I have the same problem with many books though - sometimes I find it unbelievable that a character wouldn't just refuse to get involved without all the information I would deem necessary. I made a similar comment in my review of Tithe.

However, about halfway through I was hooked. I love the idea of the Iron Fey, created when human's dreams shifted away from nature and towards science and technology. I also liked seeing how Meghan grew up and became a stronger person, and as the story that I think will be the centre of the series emerged, I felt myself settling in for the long haul!

I also really liked the contrast between the two love interests. Yes, there's a triangle, and ordinarily I'd be yawning at the merest whiff of one but I don't know which of the two guys I prefer yet! Also, it's really not that important to the story, at least not in The Iron King, and I hope it remains somewhat of a background detail and stays out of the major plot in the future books.

The characterisation was best for Puck and Ash, but they stand out from the rest of the fey with their morally ambigious natures. It's more difficult to figure them out than most of the other characters. I loved Grimalkin the best, however, and I hope he appears a lot in the other books. I can't tell what he wants, ultimately, but he is very funny and clever.

I am going to largely reserve my judgement until I have read the rest of the series, but I enjoyed The Iron King and would recommend that you give it a try if you've enjoyed other stories set in the world of the fey.

If you've already read amd loved The Iron King, some suggestions for you:

• Tithe, by Holly Black - another story about a faery changeling, but this time, the main character is the changeling

•  Ash, by Malinda Lo - a retelling of Cinderella in which she makes a deal with a powerful fairy, rather than being saved by a fairy godmother

Book Review: Ironside, by Holly Black

Photo by Jon Mountjoy

This book is the third in a trilogy and therefore this review will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, Tithe, and the second, Valiant.

On the darkest day of winter, Roiben will be crowned King of the Unseelie Court, and as terrible and terrifying as the Unseelie Court can be, Kaye can't resist going down to celebrate. Kaye's known that she is a faerie for a few months now, but the ways of the fey, especially the court customs, are mostly a mystery to her.

Just as they are to Cornelius Stone, who is still recovering from his sister's death and the time he spent in the Unseelie Court as the human pet of the former queen's knight, and later king, Nephamael. He's desperate to find out how to protect himself from the fey, so that they can never hurt him or his family again.

But whilst Corny is nervous and prepared, Kaye is rash and wild, and her official declaration of love to Roiben ends with her being given an impossible quest - to find a faerie that can lie. No such creature exists, and so Kaye is forbidden from even speaking to Roiben - a task that proves increasingly difficult as Silarial, Queen of the Seelie Court, is still determined to win the war and rule over Unseelie.

My favourite sequels are those that make me feel like I'm slipping comfortably into a familiar world, and I definitely felt that when I read the first few pages of Ironside. It's difficult to comment on the characterisation and world-building, because most of the characters and many of the locations were introduced in Tithe and Valiant, and Ironside provides more of the same atmosphere. I liked Kaye better, but I still didn't feel that I understood her as much as I understood Corny and Val. However, the plot was fantastic. It was a fun and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Modern Faerie Tales, and I was gripped the whole way through.

Although this series had a shaky start, the engrossing world, dark elements, and plot drew me in and kept me interested. I can see why these books, particularly the first one, have had mixed reviews, but if you like dark fantasy, and don't mind teenagers doing things that many adults would disapprove of, I would recommend the Modern Faerie Tales. I'm really looking forward to reading more from Holly Black in the future.

Book Review: Valiant, by Holly Black

Photo by cosmicautumn

This book is the second in a trilogy and therefore this review may contain spoilers for the first book, Tithe.

Val has a quick temper and a tendency to respond to insults violently, but when she walks in on the worst of all insults, and sees her boyfriend and her mother kissing and getting undressed, all she can think to do is get away. She goes to the hockey game that was supposed to be a date, and then she doesn't go back. Homeless in New York City, she meets friendly, strange Lolli, and Dave, her infatuated friend. Lolli is immediately welcoming, Dave is more reluctant, and his brother, Luis, is against Val's presence from the start. Luis is guarding a secret, one it turns out Lolli is all too happy to blab - Luis can see faeries, and works running errands for one, a troll. Lolli is addicted to a mysterious faerie drug, and also all too happy to lead Val into the troll's lair...

The troll, Ravus, is an exile from the Seelie court, which is how Valiant ties in with Tithe, and it does so beautifully, introducing a vivid new cast of characters, and including brief appearances from Kaye, Roiben and Silarial. The story is tightly focused around Val and her development, which is realistic and appropriately paced, but it also firmly advances the plot of the trilogy. 

Like Tithe, Valiant is laden with atmosphere. Yet in terms of build up, Valiant is the opposite of Tithe. I felt it was almost too slow to get going into the plot, although I could appreciate the proper introduction that we got to Val's character, after the rush that was Tithe and my discomfort with Kaye's characterisation. I think that the pacing and characterisation in general were much better than in Tithe. The motivations of the characters were definitely clearer.

Another way in which Valiant is dramatically different to Tithe is that whereas Kaye and Roiben's romance had a bit of a whiff of the ol' insta-love about it, the romance that develops in Valiant is more like slowly burning lust that turns into love. I also liked that the romance wasn't the whole of the plot, in fact most of the time there wasn't any romance, as Val was focused on trying to avoid her previous life. I'm trying not to spoil the plot but Valiant is billed as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and it's the only retelling of Beauty and the Beast I have liked thus far, being devoid of Stockholm Syndrome, which I can't stand. Give me insta-love any day of the week over Stockholm Syndrome. Or better yet, give me Valiant, which has neither. Hurrah.

On the subject of plot - it was totally gripping, I loved it! Valiant had me doing something I hadn't done in a long time - staying up late to finish the book! I just could not bear to consider sleep until it was done. All in all, I thought Valiant was a brilliant second book, it left me desperate to read Ironside and find out what happened to our motley heroes in the end.

Valiant is definitely a book for older teens - it's got swearing, sex, and the consumption of fairy drugs. Plus plenty of other stuff some parents may disapprove of, like teenagers with dyed hair and piercings. To me, all this stuff makes a book a must-read, but your mileage may vary...

Book Review: Tithe, by Holly Black

Photo by a.pitch

When Kaye and her mother move back into her grandmother's house, Kaye takes the opportunity to call on some old friends. There's Janet, and her brother Corny...but there are also three faeries she hopes to find. But the faeries don't come when she calls them, and even leaving out milk for them doesn't bring them to her window. She starts to doubt that they were real, but then, whilst out with Janet and her friends, she sits on an old carousel horse. Kaye imagines it coming to life, imagines what it would be like to ride it, were it alive, and then, for just long enough for Janet's boyfriend to see, it does start to move. Kaye runs away from the group, and it's whilst she's on the way home that she hears strange sounds coming from the woods. She goes to investigate, and that's where she meets Roiben, a faerie knight. He's wounded, and she helps him, relieved to know that the fey are real. With his silver hair and strange presence, she can't get him out of her mind.

Soon after, Kaye finally meets two of her old friends again and finds herself entangled in a plot to ensure the freedom of the solitary fey, who will be bound to the service of the Unseelie Court for seven years if the planned Tithe - the sacrifice of a human - goes ahead. Kaye's friends explain that they intend to trick the Unseelie Queen, Nicnevin, by having Kaye taken to be used as the Tithe, Kaye, who is actually a faerie, but has been disguised as a human all her life. At the last minute, Kaye's real self will be revealed, ruining the Tithe, but Kaye doesn't want to wait. Kaye wants to discover what being a faerie means now.

This is actually the second time I've read Tithe, here are my initial thoughts on it, as included in a Goodreads review. I gave it four out of five stars:

I would have loved this had there just been a bit more to it. It seemed more like a snapshot than like I was pulled into the world of the story. I liked all the details that were there, there was just too much missing, like it was pared down to the bare minimum to make a good story. I felt like there should have been some flashbacks or some other device to show us what Kaye's life was like up to the point where Tithe begins. The characterisation was good, the story worked, but I wanted to become absorbed, and sometimes, you just need more pages for that, to be in the world longer. People with a shorter attention span or tendencies to imagine that they are the protagonist (something I grew out of) will probably adore Tithe.

The pacing was also uneven, what we get of the story feels right as we read it, description balanced nicely with action, but it jumps too often, and there was little time given to showing us what the protagonists actually thought about all that was going on. The action takes place over a couple of days, but it slows down often enough that I felt more reflection from the point of view characters would have fit in nicely.

Despite my initial misgivings I liked it enough to want to read the second in the trilogy, Valiant. I reread Tithe this year before continuing with the series. I enjoyed it more this time around, possibly because I expected the concise storytelling, and could just let the lovely descriptions wash over me without wishing there were more actual scenes to the story. I do still think that there could have been a bit more to it, and I still didn't entirely empathise with Kaye's character - she's too much of a drifter. She gets curious and asks questions, but doesn't demand that they are answered, and she typically goes along with what other characters want without thinking about it much. Maybe that's the effect of a survival mechanism developed to help her cope with life following her mother around from nightclub to bar to nightclub. This improves towards the end, when she works something out before anyone else.

The level of description in Holly Black's writing is perfect. The descriptive sections are fairly brief, but every scene has atmosphere and the details about the faerie courts are great, I could easily visualise them in my mind. The moral questions raised in the story fit very well within their context. Like humans, the faeries vary in terms of personality and regard for ethics, but all of them have dark aspects. The fairies are not benevolent spirits - many of them see humans as lesser beings, toys. It's very much a book for older teens because of this - there's plenty of death and pain.

I've finished reading both sequels and I loved them, so I would happily recommend Tithe to fans of dark fantasy, fans of dark faeries, older teenagers, and people who, like me, prefer to read books for older teens. My review of Valiant, the second in the Modern Faerie Tale series, will follow shortly.

Book Review: I Was A Teenage Fairy, by Francesca Lia Block

Photo by Courtney Carmody // OpenEyesPhoto

Barbie’s mother used to be a beauty queen, but never made a successful career out of being a model. It is her dream for Barbie to achieve all she couldn’t, and so she drags the little girl to agency after agency, trying to persuade them to take her on. Barbie doesn’t want to be a model, she’s frightened of standing in front of the camera lens, and is more interested in the tiny fairy girl she found one day in her garden, who calls herself Mab. Eventually Barbie’s mother finds a photographer willing to photograph her, Hamilton Waverley, but he has a darker agenda.

Five years later, Barbie is a teenager haunted by what Hamilton Waverley did to her. Her mother spends all day in front of the television drinking, and Barbie sneaks out at night to go to parties. But one night Mab comes along with her, and everything starts to change when Barbie meets Griffin, another model who began working as a child, and Todd, an successful actor.

I have mixed feelings about Francesca Lia Block’s work. The writing is beautiful and there are passages in every book that I want to copy out and stick inside my wardrobe so that I can read them every day, but sometimes the description drowns out what’s actually going on and I find her plots to be too weakly present for me to really be able to get on with them. With some of the stories, like Echo, I finish reading and I can’t remember what actually happened, or I feel like I missed it. All the one-story books are very short, novellas rather than novels. This makes them easy to re-read, but all the characters and their issues are introduced very quickly and without much detail. The characters are very simply sketched. They’re not stereotypes, but they’re not fully fleshed out either. Francesca Lia Block has some great characters although after a few books I started to notice that she has favourite types to write about, and I find her teenagers more believable than the children. To sum it up, her writing doesn’t place style above substance in the conventional sense, because she deals with a lot of serious issues, but she treats everything with an ethereal touch.

I Was a Teenage Fairy, in my opinion, doesn’t have most of these flaws. The plot is tight and the passages that are just description break it up nicely and add to the atmosphere. Mab is the most memorable character, a beautiful fairy who isn’t very nice. She finds Barbie’s inaction frustrating and hates her mother. She’s also obsessed with men! Barbie is an introvert forced into the spotlight, brought up in a different family, she would spend most of her time reading, studying and thinking. I would have liked to know more about them, but I found them believable and interesting.

Barbie, named after the doll, is a model who wishes she could be on the other side of the camera. She doesn’t find herself beautiful, but other people clearly do. Her mother starts putting her on diets at age eleven, and buys her a Barbie doll for every birthday, wishing that her daughter would look like that. The book is set in Hollywood, and all of Barbie’s friends and acquaintances of the same age are models or actors. Barbie’s body image issues are never directly addressed, but she stops worrying about them as she gains the confidence to be herself and stop doing what her mother wants her to do.

If you haven’t read Francesca Lia Block before, I Was A Teenage Fairy is a good place to start. Fans often recommend you start with Block’s first novella, Weetzie Bat, which is what I did, but I wasn’t sure I liked it until the second read and it didn’t really make sense until I read the other books in the Dangerous Angelsseries! I think I Was A Teenage Fairy is more immediately accessible.