The Iron King by Julie Kagawa
One can tell by picking up the cover of this book that Iron King will involve a beautiful teen and some hot, probably supernatural boys. Imagine if someone combined Labyrinth with Midsummer Night’s Dream and added some sexy boys. If that sounds good to you, stop reading this review right now, because I don’t want to ruin what is probably a perfectly acceptable story.
Let’s talk about what works in this book first. There’s a ton of action. The plot is pretty much non-stop from page one. Meghan is about to turn 16 and she really wants to get a driver’s permit. She has the hots for a cute boy at school, even though her best friend is also hot. We see where this is going, the reader thinks, but wait! Next thing you know, Meghan is off to the Neverland or nevermore or the nevernever (fairy kingdom, at any rate) to find her brother. He’s not wearing striped pajamas, but the parallels to the movie Labyrinth seem similar. I liked Ethan (the baby brother) best of all. Ethan has a stuffed rabbit which he talks about as if it’s a friend, which I thought was a really nice touch. So far, it was seeming like a book that copied heavily on Tithe, except without good characters and an interesting twist.
Robbie then reveals his true identity is none other than Robin Goodfellow, aka Puck, and that’s when I first dry heaved. I understand that many people love “charming readaption of famous story” but I really don’t like it. Sometimes it’s done well. For example, I liked The Wide Sargasso Sea and I liked Wicked because in the first case, it took a minor character and told a luscious and intricate back story. In the second case, it did something similar, while also deepening the world. It’s possible to revise someone else’s story and make something fresh and new out of it. 99% of the time however, the author is just cheating, piggybacking off of more famous work so that they don’t have to do their own worldbuilding. Plus, Midsummer Night’s Dream has been ripped off so many times.
If I were a teen and had never read someone else’s rendition of Irish fairies via Shakespeare, I might find this fresh and new. But I’m not a teen, and I’ve read around a while, so using Oberon and Titania and Mab as characters really ticked me off. It’s like when someone says they’ve made you a dessert and they’ve just diagonally cut a Twinkie and set it on end in a smear of strawberry jam from a jar. That’s not making a dessert, that’s taking a huge shortcut by stealing something premade and pretending it’s an original creation. Sure, people who have never seen a Twinkie before might think you’re a great baker, but it feels like a lazy cheat. It’s not just disappointingly boring, it’s borderline plagiarism. Just because William S. is in the public domain, doesn’t mean it’s okay to steal from him, m’kay? Borrowing plots is one thing, but lifting actual characters without even changing their names is shoddy craftsmanship.
But hey, I get it, this is a teen romance. It’s supposed to be about the romance as well as the adventure. We have Robbie, and we have Ash. There’s no picture of Ash but let’s just say he sounds like the guy who would be shirtless on the front page of Slytherin’s fundraising calendar. He’s supposedly immortal, like Robbie, but they were both kind of in-between immortals and teens. Basically teen boys without the puberty. They were immature and they were hot for a sixteen-year-old, so in that regard they were either teens or pervy men, but they weren’t insecure like teens, nor were they wise like people who had been around a while. So they were like pervy immature men in the body of teens. The author kept having to remind me what they looked like, because their actions weren’t very hot. Well, to be fair, they do save Meghan a lot. She needs a lot of saving.
Which brings me to Meghan. Meghan’s good quality is that she’s brave and willing to do what it takes to save her brother. She actually shows creative initiative at one point in the story, doing some small thing to trick some really dumb captors into not killing her until she can get saved by someone else. Other than that though, she’s spoiled, self-centered, irritating, and obstreperous as hell. While she’s in the real world, all she does is whinge about how no one likes her, she doesn’t have any friends, she’s poor, she doesn’t have a car, wah wah wah. I wanted to sympathize with her, but it just didn’t seem like there was anything she liked. It’s hard to like people who don’t like anything. Even poor people who don’t have cars can usually find one thing that they like to do, one hobby that they can make friends around. Maybe she raises goats? Maybe she likes to run in the woods? Maybe she has, you know, friends? As it turns out, Robbie is her only friend, and he’s only her friend because he’s been ordered to keep an eye out on her. She doesn’t even like her mom that much, and half the time when she’s talking to or about Ethan, she’s just irritated with him.
When Meghan goes to fairyland, she basically ignores every piece of sensible advice she’s given. Don’t go in the woods, she’s told. Guess what she does? Put on this gown, she’s told, and guess what she doesn’t do? I get that obedience is not a trait favored among modern heroines, but considering how foolish and hapless she was, a little adherence to wiser people might have seemed prudent. Like, if you’re in a dangerous foreign court, maybe keep your mouth shut and your ears open and learn some protocol? Nah, that’s what someone smart would do. It’s like a novice who goes on a dive trip and doesn’t do anything the dive master says, or someone on a safari who thinks it’s funny to shout at the gorillas even after the guide says to be quiet. It’s not brave, it’s the kind of idiocy that gets other people killed. Meghan’s strategy seems to be “blunder ahead, and get saved despite her best efforts, and if she can’t get saved, take out the equivalent of a usurious payday loan with a fairy and hope it all works out.” Why did Ash and Robbie even like her? I found her incredibly unlikable. Maybe she’s pretty, I guess. Hey, it’s a romance novel. I guess hot guys falling for unlikable girls is par for the course. But at least Bella Swan could cook. What can Meghan do? She has magic powers she can’t use. She tries and fails and then doesn’t do anything about it until the end, when suddenly she can do it, even though we never saw her really practice. Where’s an 80’s rock ballad montage when you need one?
And also, the whole immortal thing didn’t really work for me. Fairyland didn’t really seem to fit. People die easily in fairyland, and if you die easily, you’re not really immortal now, are you? And if you die easily, you need to breed fast to keep up your numbers. If you live forever, and you’re in a place where people die easily, wouldn’t you have had a few kids? Maybe? Ash and Robbie have both had people die that they cared about, and yet neither one of them seems to have grown up in the way you would if you were say, older than fifteen. They don’t have families or real history, so they seemed incomplete. If Ash were really immortal, and hot, he would have been on his fifth widowhood by now, having had many, many stories about the wives he’d loved and lost, and he’d have kids too. And probably grandkids. Which would have made you go “why is he hitting on a sixteen-year-old child again?” Ash and Robbie seemed like handsome cardboard cutouts who followed Meghan around because she’s the heroine and she’s pretty. Despite her being obnoxious and stubborn and boring, a person who makes no attempt at congeniality, supernatural creatures right and left fall over themselves to help her and gain her favor.
Some of the plot could have been really good. I liked the plot with the Iron King, and the technology godlings were creative enough that they seemed influenced by, rather than straight-up ripped off from Neil Gaiman. Heroine saves the day and comes home again, knowing she’s been changed enough that she can’t really go home again. That coulda’ been a winner. At the end, Meghan has to go see her mom again and find out who her dad really was, and what the whole story was there, and instead of being a satisfying explanation, it just leaves more questions than answers. Meghan said her dad “disappeared” when she was a child, but it’s not clear if the guy who disappeared was her bio dad or her mom’s husband. If it was her bio dad who disappeared, what happened to her mom’s husband? If it was her mom’s husband, why did he disappear? Maybe if I keep reading the series, they’ll explain it, teasing it out to be this big mystery. Or maybe it’s just shoddy writing and I’m the only one who noticed that it didn’t make sense. Could go either way. King Oberon said that Meghan’s mom was amazing, enchanting, one of a kind, but in this end scene her mom is just kind of whiny. Like mother like daughter, right? And then there’s the big reveal and Meghan comes to terms with her fairy heritage, but it’s not as satisfying as when Holly Black did it in Tithe, because it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Or maybe it worked for readers who weren’t completely disengaged by that point. Maybe if the lazy derivative Shakespearean fan-ficery hadn’t enraged me, she wouldn’t have lost me as a reader.
I was so sure I’d like this book that I took it as my entertainment on a four-hour plane ride. If I hadn’t been out of candy crush lives, I wouldn’t have finished it. The cover is beautiful, the back blurb sounds exciting, and YA paranormal romance, amiright? Beautiful teen and sexy warrior boys love triangle saving the world while making goo-goo eyes at each other. How can one muck that up? Seriously, did we even get a single steamy kiss? No, because there’s no chemistry. When the heroine is a whiny self-absorbed brat, the heroes are cardboard, and the plot and world is a counterfeit knockoff of better books we all read in the 00’s, it’s hard to rally behind a couple of crazy kids finding love.
But hey, if you’ve never had really good sponge cake filled with real Chantilly cream, a stale fake Twinkie might seem a fine dessert.* And if you’re hungry enough and stuck at 10,000 feet, even a stale fake Twinkie can seem good enough to finish, even if you sigh and wish it had been a little bit fresher and made from scratch. I can’t go back in time to when I still thought Twinkies were good, and I can’t go back in time and forget all the better books I’ve read enough to enjoy this one, but if you can, good on you.
(*No disrespect intended to people who like Twinkies. I am fond of Oreos so I live in a glass house in this regard.)
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