Review: The Iron King

The Iron King by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was so disappointed in this book it's ridiculous. It has a lot of good reviews, and I know that at least one person I know liked it, but I did not enjoy it much at all. The two stars are essentially for Grimm (the cat), who was the most believable of all the characters, and Ethan (the little brother) who was just so adorable according to my imagination.

Meghan Chase (the extra "h" in the name "Meghan" trips me up because to me, that's just the wrong way to spell it, but of course I'm biased) is the daughter of Oberon and her human mother, who she paints to be totally nuts and bitch-tastic but doesn't seem to be much worse than any normal mother. After the man she believes to be her father (her mother's first husband) disappears, they move to another city, her mother re-marries a man who barely notices Meghan, and they have a son named Ethan who gets all the attention. Meghan is a typical whiny teenager who thinks her life is terrible when she really has it easy (aside from the horrible bully, but really, she was dumb to fall for his apology anyway). Then she finds out she's really half fairy and THAT HER WHOLE LIFE WAS A LIE, and everything changes. And formula from here.

She never actually *does* anything until we get to the end of the book.  Up until that point, everyone does everything for her.  We see Puck helping her in the woods, as well as Grimm, and Ash, and anyone else she manages to blunder into who doesn't immediately try to eat her.  Another reviewer mentioned Damsel in Distress Syndrome - that's exactly it.

[Spoilers after this point]



The thing that really bothered me about this book was that Meghan was just so stupid. She gets mad at Puck for leaving her behind when he was really just trying to protect her (duh). She wanders off into the woods where scary things are lurking just because she sees an image of her brother, even after Puck warns her against wandering off because something will EAT HER. She keeps making deals with fae and ending up deeper and deeper in debt. And she drags Ash into the Iron King's kingdom even though she knows it's going to kill him, and she could have totally taken the journey by herself.

But whatever, because she's a girl, and she's pretty, so of course she'll have two boys in love with her and everything will work out just fine, right? By the end of the book she's saved her brother and forgotten all about her "father." And here comes handsome Ash to take her to Queen Mab's court. OH NOES.

Like I said, two stars for Grimm and Ethan, but other than that the book wasn't worth the read and I will not be reading the sequel.

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