The Iron King

I read the book The Iron King by Julie Kagawa. This book is part of The Iron Fey series. The Iron King is based on William Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The theme is friendship and finding yourself, but it also is about beliefs and how science has changed our world.

The plot centers around a sixteen-year-old girl named Meghan Chase. Meghan never fits in anywhere she goes, including at school and at home. She has one friend named Robbin Goodfellow, also known as Puck. He is a prankster and always cheers Meghan up.

On Meghan’s sixteenth birthday, she comes home to discover that her little brother has been taken away and replaced by a changeling. Also she finds out that her trusted best friend, Puck, is a faery and that there is a whole other world filled with fey beings. Meghan and Puck enter that other world, which is called the Nevernever, to retrieve Meghan’s brother.

Because Meghan doesn’t have knowledge of the Nevernever, she soon gets into trouble, but a cat named Gmilkin saves her. Meghan eventually discovers that she is half fey and not just any fey -- her father is the king of all summer fey. Later, Meghan meets Ash, the winter queen’s son, and persuades him to help her and Puck look for her brother. The four of them are forced to fight and con their way through the fey world. They make progress toward their goal, but aren’t successful in reaching it by the end of this book in the series.

As I read The Iron King, I found myself enjoying it at times and being disappointed at others. My disappointment was because I found that there were just too many fantasy elements in the book. It was just overdone at times to the point of interfering with my ability to follow the plot of the story. Speaking of the plot, though, it’s the underlying story that I enjoyed the most about the book. I really like the developing friendships among the characters and the strategies they came up with to overcome obstacles and get closer to their goal.

All things considered, although I enjoyed The Iron King at times, the distraction of the heavy fantasy elements leads me to advise other readers to save their time and skip this book. 

Book Review by Gabi G.