Thoughts on The Iron King

Confession: I may be the only person in the blogosphere who didn't like this book.

I'm sorry. I really wanted to like it. I tried hard to like it. I was besotted with its pretty cover. I was glad that the main character's name was Meghan, since that is my best friend's name and I don't see it very often at all in YA novels. Which, when you think about it, is strange, since it's such a common name in real life.

But I never got around to finishing it.

I was hoping it would be a different kind of faery book, one that didn't play on the over-used classifications of Seelie and Unseelie courts, the gritty, beautiful-but-tricky-and-dangerous kind of Holly Black faeries. Don't get me wrong, Holly Black is great, but I feel like her books have spawned a lot of copycats that killed faeries for me.

But The Iron King was kind of... meh. Didn't stand out of the pack enough for me. And the Meghan character really pissed me off. The faeries kept asking her to make deals with them and stuff, and she would blindly agree to the deals without even hearing the faeries' conditions, even though they made it clear that it would be a terrible deal for her. I was like, argh! Just ask what they want already, and THEN make your decision! Don't just sign away your life without educating yourself!!!

The love interest was forgettable, the quirky cat character was a totally blatant Cheshire Cat rip-off. Meghan was insufferably dumb. The one thing I really, really liked in this book was a villain, and I randomly got super super stoked about the idea of him.

But that wasn't enough to get me to finish the book. It just didn't grab me, it was too easy to put down. So I did.

I'd give it a 2/5. But hey, every other blogger and reviewer seemed to love it. It might be right up your alley!