Iron King by Julie Kagawa is a good train book. A train book is any book small enough to fit into one's bag for reading on public transportation and light enough in content to be able to be shoved aside so that you can gawk at the kid who just got on and who has enough metal jabbed through parts of his face to be easily picked up by a magnetized space ship.
The story offers the average salad bar selections of a young adult fantasy read – unknown magic revealed, a hero's quest, self-discovery, material impoverishment, and a few tried morality lessons tossed in for dressing. In Iron King, the heroine, Meghan Chase, discovers that she is not just an awkward teenager, but is also magical. The plot is as familiar as the strange birth mark that you've had and obsessed about since you were five. If you've read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter or Clare Cassandra's Mortal Instrument series, you'll be familiar with the “OMG” I have magical power's plot. An adolescent discovers that her gawkiness and divergence from the cool crowd has absolutely nothing to do with her being a unique human being, but instead that she is a magical being – oddness explained and individuality finally embraced as a huggable trait. Why read the genre? Think of young adult fantasy books as disguised teenage self-help books and you may wish you had these “woobie” pages to hold onto when you had passed through the hormonal tidalwaves of adolescence yourself.
In Iron King, Chase's hero's quest is to save her younger brother who has been kidnapped by naughty fairies. She has to enter the forbidding world of NeverNever where the fairies live with a host of other scary and magical creatures. Kagawa paints a decent description of NeverNever's wilderness and barren landscapes, enough to see in the mind's eye Chase's treacherous passage. A quick montage of Chase's quest involves her meeting her biological father, talking to a cat, fighting off evil fairies, an unfounded love affair with an enemy fairy, and the rescuing of her brother by confronting the Iron King.
Kagawa hits key morality lessons in Iron King – respect for each other, the importance of honesty and compassion, and the “I'm OK, You're OK” adage. She also throws in a save your earth message. NeverNever land is being polluted by techno-trash (eg, discarded computers, mobile phones, TVs). The pollution, as in the real world, is slowly causing swaths of land to become barren and making the fairies sick. Chase's primary hunt is to find her brother, who has been kidnapped, but the one she must David-to-Goliath is to eliminate the Iron King and banish his use of techno-trash as an assured-destruction weapon. A big journey for a teen who just found out she wasn't who she thought she was.
Does the book bridge from young adult to entertaining adult read? Maybe. I finished it, which I can't say for young adult books that are only captivating for ten year olds. Yet, as an adult reader, the book is predictable and the love interest is not well developed and a bit too dramatic even for teenagers. Kagawa kept the ending open enough that I have a minor interest in dropping back into NeverNever to see what happens next to Meghan Chase; yet, it will be a while. It's not a rush out and grab the next book type of book.
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