Iron King (Iron Fey, #1)

by Julie Kagawa

Enter a fantastical world of dangerous faeries, wicked princes and one half-human girl who discovers her entire life is a lie.

Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared when she was six. Ten years later, when her little brother also goes missing, Meghan learns the truth--she is the secret daughter of a mythical faery king and a pawn in a deadly war. Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she loves, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face...and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart.

Books and novellas in the Iron Fey series:
The Iron King (special edition includes "Winter's Passage"* ebook novella)
The Iron Daughter (special edition includes the "Guide to the Iron Fey"*)
The Iron Queen (special edition includes "Summer's Crossing"* ebook novella)
The Iron Knight (special edition includes "Iron's Prophecy"* ebook novella)
The Lost Prince
The Iron Traitor
The Iron Warrior

*Also available in The Iron Legends anthology

Books in the Iron Fey: Evenfall series:
The Iron Raven

• ISBN10: 0606149090
• ISBN13: 9780606149099
• Publish Date: 19 January 2010 (first published 1 January 2010)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 23 March 2021
• Imprint: Turtleback Books
• Edition: Bound for Schools & Libraries ed.
• Format: Hardcover (Library Binding)
• Pages: 363
• Language: English

Reviews

The Iron King introduces Meghan Chase, a brave and determined sixteen year old who is terrified of the things that go bump in the night - but unwilling to turn a blind eye when her brother, Ethan, is kidnapped.

I liked Meghan, she could be a bit dumb at times but generally had her head screwed on right. For the most part she was a likeable character with a good sense of humour and a decent amount of bravery. But I wasn't all that keen on Puck - he was a bit too boisterous and ridiculous for my liking. Grimalkin was hilarious. ("I'm a Cat.") I loved Ash - although I didn't love his backstory (show spoiler)[ with his one true love killed. I've never been a huge fan of second romances - I prefer one true loves in my romance. ] (hide spoiler) . He did frustrate me at times but overall I was intrigued and he was pretty thoughtful and kind at times. The romance between Meghan and Ash was completely instalove but it's so swoonworthy it's hard to remember why that's an issue unless you start dissecting. Plus they have the whole starcrossed lovers thing happening, which adds danger.

The novel was well paced and the storyline was well plotted. There's plenty of action and the paranormal elements work well together. There's nothing particularly new in this but it's well written and as such stands out as one of the better paranormal reads out there.

A strong paranormal romance. 4 stars.

[Quirky Cat]

Yet another read that I am long overdue for! The Iron King is the first novel in Julie Kagawa's oft talked about Iron Fey series. With a new addition to the series on the way, now seemed like a good time to finally dive on in.

There was a time when Meghan Chase thought she was an ordinary girl. Minus the fact that her father disappeared – that is. That illusion is about to be torn apart, as the things that go bump in the night force their way into her world.

Now, she's going to enter a world of magic and imagination, with her prankster best friend by her side. The real question is, what will she come up against in the process, and what are her odds of survival?

“Metallic trees. That's new. If you see any steel dryads, be sure to tell me so I can run away screaming.”

The Iron King is a fast-paced start to this series, and has already gone a long way in explaining why there have been so many additions to it. Meghan's adventure is quick and tense, and she's going to have a lot more to learn in order to survive this world.

I'm not going to lie, I really do wish that I had read this series sooner. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because I feel like my younger self would have enjoyed the read even more. It's a bit depressing to think about it like that, isn't it?

The Iron King leans more towards the younger side of Young Adult fiction. Meghan is sixteen, but there are times where she feels even younger. As such, a younger audience will likely identify with her more (see why I wish I had read it when I was younger?). Still, adults can appreciate the situation and the world, even without agreeing with all of her thoughts and plans.

“Ladies and Felines," he stated grandly, grasping the doorknob, "Welcome to Tir Na Nog. Land of endless winter and shitloads of snow.”

I love the world, I really do. It's not quite a typical fae world – and that makes it all the better, in my mind. Kagawa felt confident enough to infuse her own imagination into the world – literally, as the case may be. I can't wait to see how that spirals in future novels.

On that note, I've already requested The Iron Daughter (as well as the next three books) from the library, so time for me to get back to reading!

Check out more reviews over at Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

[sstaley]

I've been waiting such a long to read this series. Now that I'm getting in the habit of listening to audiobooks when I get ready in the morning, I've been listening to books I've had on my To-Read list for years. I really liked this first book in The Iron Fey series. The action starts off pretty soon and doesn't let up much. I love YA fantasy books and this is right up my alley. I really love to read books with Fey and magic. This series has several books so that makes me happy. I'm excited to read the next book.

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

The Iron King is a fun, fluffy read with a little danger, a little romance, and a lot of faeries. Also a little Alice in Wonderland - that part left me a bit flabbergasted...exactly how does the Cheshire cat fit into the faery world of redcaps and chimeras? But ok. It was definitely interesting. The hands down BEST part of this book is all the descriptions of the various fae, the Winter, Summer, and Iron Courts. I haven't read many books based around the fae, so to me at least the Iron Court construct was entirely new and OMG IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. Holy shit balls batman. Consider me successfully creeped out and a little sad.

The characters...well, the MC is actually not that compelling. I was not a real Meghan fan, but I definitely didn't hate her. Her motivations I could understand though, and her love for her little brother melted my heart. Her loyalty was also something I could relate to...Meghan is incapable of putting any goal or end result before the people she cares about, even when the result would be the greater good. Now Robbie, I loved. I hope we see a LOT more of him in the next books! Ash was...ooooh, look, tall-dark-handsome-brooding-powerful-hero = instalove. SIGH. He had some cool powers though. The romance was meh. Meghan is very young and naïve and...well, maybe that's my almost-30-year-old self being jaded but I just wasn't feeling it AT ALL.

3.5/5 stars overall. I'm looking forward to the next book and can't wait to see how this Iron Court thing plays out! It wasn't a true hangover ending but it's SO wide open for more possibilities...
------------------------------------------
I won an e-book of this from a blog giveaway ages ago, and finally got around to reading it! Sadly I don't remember which blog.

[Angie]

Rereading! :D

I ended up liking this one straight from the beginning. It was different than I was expecting, in a good, weird way. Meghan is dirt poor, the step-daughter of a pig farmer, only has old clothes, and is ridiculed (quite harshly) at school for being "a hick." Very different than the usual heroine. This is truly a rags to riches story, as Meghan is really a faery princess. Her best friend, Robbie, is none other than Robin Goodfellow, aka Puck! Any story that references Shakespeare is okay in my book!

The Nevernever is an interesting place. I love how it seems like a combination of elements (and characters) from A Midsummer's Night Dream, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland. It's a simultaneously beautiful and terrible place, full of all kinds of violent creatures. The laws of physics also don't apply there, and time has no meaning. It's amazing that Meghan was able to survive her first day on her own lost in the forest!

I have mixed feelings about Meghan. I like her, most likely because I feel sorry for her. She hasn't exactly had the most glamorous or pleasant life. But on the other hand, she sometimes says and does things that make me cringe. Like when she puts on her dirty, smelly, soaking wet clothes instead of a nice dress provided for her, just because she wants to own her poorness, or whatever. There's no shame in not being able to afford designer clothes, but there's no reason to be unhygienic just to show off that you're comfortable being poor!

The one thing that I did not enjoy at all was the "romance." It was obvious from the time they met, but there was no development. The whole book they're at odds with each other, then BOOM, kissing. What?! It was a lot too sudden and seemingly out of nowhere. Plus, it didn't exactly lead anywhere either. I think the romance element could have waited until at least the next book.

While much of the plot is focused on Meghan finding her brother (and possibly father), there's an overarching story of the Nevernever dying as it's taken over by iron. I absolutely loved the aspect of how the Nevernever is essentially fueled by human belief in fairies. But as humans become more and more reliant on advanced technology, it's leaking over into the Faeryland and is causing some quite terrible problems. If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!

I really enjoyed The Iron King. It was fast paced, interesting, and I loved the fey lore that was used in it. Although Ironhorse had me cracking up, since whenever he spoke I heard Optimus Prime!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[Nessa Luna]

Read this review and more on my blog October Tune.

I bought this book over a year ago, because I thought the summary sounded interesting. Still it took me this long to actually start reading the book, and that may have been because of the little circle on the cover saying this book was 'The Next Twilight'. After reading the book I can honestly say that the sticker is wrong. This book felt more a bit like the next Mortal Instruments, in my opinion.

There was a girl, with an artistic mother, who turned out to be special. She had a bit of a nerdy best friend and she fell hopelessly in love with a douch-ey guy who kind of clashed with her best friend a bit. Her best friend did also turn out to have a bit of a crush on her. Also someone she loved very dearly got kidnapped by the bad people. Yeah, as I started to read more and more it just sounded more like City of Bones and though I really disliked CoB, I liked The Iron King a bit more. Not really sure why though, because with the entire love-triangle and the kind of insta-love Meghan experienced with Ash it wouldn't really have been the book for me.

I think it's because this book was a bit more scary and gory than TMI was, with some really (imo) disturbing descriptions of things (in a sexual way not a murderous way) being done to humans by the faeries. I also liked this better because they almost immediately went to the faery world, and I liked it when that happens in stories - because I've read a lot of stories like this happening in the human world already, I want to see more fictional worlds!

Still, there is one thing that I didn't like about that fictional world: no map. There was no map in this book and that is SUCH A SHAME! I want to know where all the courts are, where the places Meghan visited are, where all the trods are located; I want to know ALL OF IT!

And now for the characters; like I already said I kept on comparing Meghan to Clary from TMI a lot; she did some dumb things, she screamed almost every time she saw something scary, but in the end I started to like her a bit more (even though she still had the hots for Ash); her best friend who had like four different names in the first five chapters alone, was a bit like Simon (except that he was a 'creature' right from the start and didn't become one later on); I really liked Puck because he was just an awesome character (I don't know how to explain this without spoilering too much). Ash was DE-FI-NI-TE-LY like Jace. I disliked him right from the start, and of course disliked the romance between him and Meghan. To be fair, I started to like him a bit further in the book, but still not a lot.

Then there were some other characters, like Meghan's family (mother, stepfather and little brother Ethan); her real father, king of the Summer court who I imagined looked exactly like Thranduil from the Hobbit (I heard Lee Pace speaking every time he opened his mouth). The pack rats, which were just my favourites, and Grim. I love cats, and this cat (though sometimes a bit bitchy) was just really awesome. I know a lot of people don't like talking animals in movies or books and I honestly don't get that; I personally love it when animals talk (I would love for my cats to be able to talk, but then they'd probably be like 'gimme food' all day long).

I liked the story in general, apart from the whole love triangle thingy that I felt coming up. It was very well written, though sometimes the way things were described were a bit over the top in my opinion. But hey, that Nevernever world was probably a bit over the top sometimes.

In the end, I can say that I liked this book, even though the cover said 'The Next Twilight' and even though it felt like TMI; and I will probably read the other three books in this series as well.

My opinion on this book in one gif:

[Ashley]

Nose Graze — Book reviews & blogging tips

Judging by all the amazing reviews, I expected The Iron King to wow me, but it sooo didn't.

The #1 problem for me was my lack of feeling towards this book. I didn't care about any of it, really. I never cared about Meghan or her fate. I felt like I barely even knew her. She, along with most of the other characters, were so two dimensional. I never got invested in any of them. I didn't care if they lived or died.

But to make matters worse, I often found Meghan to be annoyingly naïve and sometimes just plain stupid. At the beginning, she accepted the existence of the Fae and the Nevernever far too easily. She was basically like, "Okay, there's this entire other world full of creates that I never knew existed. That's fine. Now what do we do?" There was no resistance or denial; she just accepted it. But then, she was told that she's actually the daughter of the faery king and there are multiple pieces of evidence to support that, but she refuses to believe it for, like, ever. And she's told that because she's his daughter she has some powers, but again she refuses to believe it's even POSSIBLE.

"I will never understand humans," he muttered. "With everything you have seen, magic, fey, monsters, and miracles, you still could not believe you could become invisible."

Or, another example, she's gone in and out of the Nevernever multiple times. She walks in through one part of the US, trots around the Nevernever, and comes out a few states away. Then, when they get ready to do the same thing later, she suddenly acts like these Nevernever "wormholes" just don't exist and she can't effortlessly travel around the country like the Fae can. It's like she's forgotten all the magical traveling they've already done before.

"You're talking about New Orleans. [..] That's hundreds of miles away!" I protested. "I have no car and no money for a plane ticket. How are we going to get there—or were we planning to hitchhike?"

You're traveling around with Fae in the Nevernever and you seriously think you're going to have to take a plane ride or hitchhike to get somewhere?

I was also annoyed with Meghan's refusal to kill anyone. People would be trying to kill her and her friends, then her friends retaliate in self-defense, and she scolds her friends for killing them. Fair enough if you don't want your friends killing people in cold blood, but these people are trying to kill you! The only way to come out unscathed is to attack them back, but she's standing there playing peacekeeper.

Then, Meghan just had a few stupid, WTF moments. Example: it starts raining, then this happens:

Water splashed over my jeans, and I yelped as something burned my skin.

We examined my leg. Tiny holes marred my jeans where the drops had hit, the material seared away, the skin underneath red and burned. It throbbed as if I'd jabbed needles into my flesh.

My first thought would be: acidic rain. As in, stay the fuck away. But Meghan's first impulse is to stick her hand outside to feel for more:

"What the heck?" I muttered, glaring into the storm. It looked like ordinary rain—gray, misty, somewhat depressing. Almost compulsively, I stuck my hand toward the opening, where the water dripped over the edge of the tube.

Awesome logic.

The final straw for me was the romance. There is no romance for 90% of the book. Literally, none. Not a single flirty conversation or romantic hint. Then all of a sudden, at 80% (show spoiler)[Meghan and Alex randomly make out. Randomly. I shit you not. One minute they're fighting an iron dragon, the next minute we get this quote: "I looked up at him, and then he was kissing me." Uhhh WHAT?? Where did that come from? And when they finally come up for air, they act like they're immediately dating and need to explain this to their parents. O_O I have no idea where that came from, but I'm not onboard with it.] (hide spoiler)

Overall, I just didn't like this book. I didn't like the tone, which felt childish and very "Alice in Wonderland" (in terms of vibe and target audience). Meghan was annoying as hell. And the romance just popped up out of thin air.

A few people have told me that the series gets REALLY good after the second book, but I'm not sure if I'm going to make it that far.

[Vicki]

3.5 stars

Re-Read - review coming soon!

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

I have noticed that lately the reviews I am writing approach the book in a chronological order: I felt this way about the beginning, this way about the middle, and this way about the end. This is an approach that English professors tend not to like. In some way, it can over-simplify things. But I find it a useful approach for some reviews, where I want my readers to understand my progression of emotions towards the book, just in case someone else has the same journey. A book that seems mediocre in the beginning can become good later on, and it would be a shame for someone who might ultimately enjoy it to DNF it in the opening chapters. The Iron King is one such book.

There is little I like about the beginning at all. The writing here is unremarkable and the story bordering on stereotypical. Meg is an under-appreciated teen with an attitude, whom for some reason I am supposed to adore in spite of (because of?) her grating personality. However, the fact that her stepfather—and essentially everyone else—literally forgets her existence is too overstated to excite my sympathy. And I can never side with the “normal” kids who need to throw lame insults at the “popular” ones in order to bolster their own confidence. Calling a girl “inflate-a-boob Angie” is not witty; it is mean and makes Meg no better than the shallow students she is supposedly setting herself against.

I almost set The Iron King down here because it dawned on me that both the story and the style sounded like something I could find on FictionPress. It was not particularly good, and I had only believed it was as good as I had because I knew it was a bestseller, that everyone loves it, and that I was supposed to believe it was good. I had a sudden revelation that, really, it was not.

This opinion lasted about to the time Meg enters Nevernever.

Here, the stereotypes begin to float away. Kagawa even explains why people always forget Meg in a way that mostly soothed my ruffled feathers. My only interpretation is that Kagawa writes fantasy better than she writes contemporary fiction.

I still have the problem that I did while reading The Treachery of Beautiful Things by Ruth Frances Long; I have not read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I am unfamiliar with all the folklore this story is based on. Nonetheless, to my uneducated senses, Kagawa seems to utilize her source material well, creating a fairy world that is equal parts beauty and danger, though the danger in Long’s interpretation seems greater. Kagawa’s best creation, however, is the iron fey themselves, who come as a fantastic and timely surprise. She does run the risk of overdoing them, but their invention is spot-on.

Ultimately, however, The Iron King is a romance, a fairly sexy one, in fact. And, ultimately, it is really cute. Meg and Ash do not really know each other, and the love triangle that is coming in book two can be smelled a mile away, but these are issues that can be easily resolved before the end of the series. For now, readers can just have fun watching the tension and attraction. I have to assume this is the primary draw of the story, since the plot is a fairly generic travelling quest.

The Iron Kingis solid, romantic, and fun. It has several elements I thought were fantastic. After all the hype, however, I found it a bit overrated. I recommend it for readers looking for a light, fun romance. Personally, I think I will pursue the rest of the series, but not as a priority.

This review was also posted at Pages Unbound Book Reviews.