The Iron Knight Book Review

The Iron Knight is the penultimate book to The Iron Fae series by Julie Kagawa. I’m told it was an unintended fourth installment designed to wrap up where Iron Queen left of. It’s written from the first person POV and rather than following Meghan Chase, the voice of the first three books, it follows Ashallayn’darkmyr Tallyn, or Ash for short.

Now it’s been too long since I read the first three for me to properly cover those so I’m going to focus on Iron Knight here and try to keep it relatively spoiler free for those who haven’t read The Iron King, The Iron Daughter and The Iron Queen.

Kagawa’s portrayal of the fae shows them to be created and maintained by human belief, dreams, stories etc and classically afraid and sickened by iron. However man’s ambition for technology has resulted in ‘the iron fae’ who, during Iron Queen, went to war with the Summer and Winter courts of faerie turning the Never Never faerie realm into an iron realm as they advance. The cost of the war ending is that Meghan, with whom Ash is in love, must stay in the iron realm but Ash, who is a fae and sickenned by iron, cannot stay with her without dieing slowly and painfully so Meghan orders him to leave and he is bound by his true name to go. He does however swear to find a way to return to her and to be with her and that’s basically where Iron Knight kicks off.

Ash is being followed, not entirely to his pleasure, by Puck (or Robin Goodfellow to some) who, in Kagawa’s portayal, is a prankster never short of a witty comment. They are attempting to find the ever condescending cat, Grimalkin, who is male. In order to then find the seer who can tell Ash how to get a soul which he needs to be human which he needs to be in the iron realm which he needs to be to be with Meghan.
Now it was clear from book 1 that Meghan had the hots for Ash, a dance and several trips and falls, not to mention Ash nearly killing himself in the initial search for her lost brother Ethan will do that to a girl. There was a brief fling with Puck where Ash told Meghan it was never going to work and left her because SummerxWinter just wasn’t going to happen but really it was obvious it was only ever going to be Ash. So on that basis you figure that the ending for Iron Knight is obvious, Ash is going to be with Meghan, just a few hoops to jump through first before he can live out his soulful mortal life with her to the end of his days right?
Pretty much.


So Ash and Puck, who have both been around for a long time now and have defined personalities have some back story. A girl was involved and they went from being best friends to sworn rivals with Ash bound by his own vow to kill Puck to avenge the death of Ariella, his first true love.

With Grimalkin found it’s not long until they find the seer, who turns out to be Ariella, who did die but the working theory is that faerie brought her back so Meghan could fulfill her purpose. Oh good, so we haven’t forgotten about Meghan. With Ariella not dead, this nullifies Ash’s vow to kill Puck on her behalf so now all that’s left is to journey to the End of the World so that Ash can get his soul. All that only 1/4 of the way through the book.

At this point it’s really a case of whether you want to skip to the end to read the inevitable happy ending or read the journey arc where everyone (including The Big Bad Wolf who came along for the fun of it) has at least one near death experience, followed by Ash being ‘tested’ where he learns about pain, conscience and mortality. For those who hadn’t thought past Ash + Soul = Happy Ever After With Meghan Kagawa writes it out for you in the third test where Ash gets a soul and mortality along with all the strings that come with it. So yes, he gets his life with Meghan, even a son and a battle wound to tell the grandchildren about but he is mortal, Meghan is not. Her half-fae blood is apparently enough to keep her young and immortal while Ash wastes away. So clearly mortality is not part of the final bargain.

Safe to say Ash gets everything that he wants and everyone is happy in the end so if you’ve read the first three and you’d like to see the romance between Ash and Meghan wrapped up then this book is perfect. It’s a well paced, easy read and a nice way to end the series.

I will say that I was hoping Ariella would fight back some more. I realise that being the seer and foretelling Ash’s future with Meghan was required for Meghan to even have a chance of achieving what she did held her back from truly trying to get back together with him. However, Ash, Puck and Grimalkin were all very much establish characters and personalities, Puck was no more able to persure Meghan than Ash, fae as his is, so he wasn’t going to be competition. Grimalkin never changed through all four books, which I think is symbolised by a hall of mirrors where each character sees the worst of themselves except Grimalkin, who just seems to find his twin. And Ash was besotted and honour bound to return to Meghan or else his life was forfeit. Really Ariella was the only one with room for any major characterisation and she didn’t put up much of a fight. Yes she was likable and honourable in the end but it was almost painful to read an entire book of akward, not quite anything.

I enjoyed the book, I wish there was more to it, if that makes sense.

The cover is very pretty, I did really like the cover art for this series!