The new year has begun with a burst of reading, much like 2013 did. And so the first and second of January were spent mostly reading the eight novels written by Julie Kagawa, which fit vaguely into the category of paranormal fantasy or urban fantasy. As more and more people write in the field, it really begins to stretch; it’s pretty easy to tell where Anita Blake is, but what do you do with a post-apocalyptic tale with vampires? In my case, you read it and enjoy it and then start worrying about which collection to put it in on my Kindle.

The books are also possibly categorised as Young Adult, though that felt much more the case with the vampire books than the faerie books. I understand that her post-apocalyptic vampire books have been optioned for making into a film or something of that sort. I can see why: vampires are popular, post-apocalyptic settings are popular, so both of them together? It seems like a great idea… if you’re the sort of person who is optioning properties for movies. And the books are good. They’re enjoyable to read, and I’m looking forward to reading the third one when it comes out in a few months. However, I’ve seen this sort of tale before. It’s not really breaking new ground and, while I’m quite happy to read books with themes I’ve seen before (a lot of my reading, to be fair), the books don’t capture my attention as much as her other series.

The other series, with an overall title of The Iron Fey, or so the Kindle says, started competently but not amazingly. It got better. It got a lot better. It’s good enough that I’m writing a blog post about it. Six novels so far – The Iron King, The Iron Daughter, The Iron Queen, The Iron Knight, The Lost Prince and The Iron Traitor. The last two actually belong to a different series that follows on from the first. And there are some novellas as well, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that The Lost Prince is actually the “Return of Nathan Brazil” of the series, that is, the one book that doesn’t follow the naming conventions of the others. (If you haven’t heard of Nathan Brazil, the series you need to look for is Jack Chalker’s Wellworld series. Every other book has Wellworld in the title, and apparently sales were down of Return, because people didn’t realise it was one of the series. Despite, you know, having the name of the main character in the title. Go figure). So, if every other book in the Iron Fey has “Iron” in the title, it was a Nathan Brazil moment.

The first Iron Fey books tell the tale of a girl who discovers she’s half-faerie, and gets dragged into the faerie world when her brother is kidnapped. The first book is a fairly typical heroic tale. The next two books develop the world a lot more, and managed to grab my attention a lot more than the first book; they’re better told and far more inventive. I was certainly very happy to see the faerie world was made cruel and capricious. Meghan, our heroine, might succeed through her efforts, but I rarely felt that everything was going to end happily, and the end of the third book felt very much like a Pyrrhic victory.

By the end of the fourth book, Meghan is mostly happy, quite powerful, and all is well.

And then there’s the fifth book. This book is told from the perspective of her younger brother, who is not happy and all is not well. Meghan couldn’t return permanently from Faerie – she’s basically trapped there – and once you start exploring the perspective of someone else who loved her, the cruelty of Faerie becomes much more apparent. I found it quite chilling. For books that look like they end “and they lived happily ever after”, there’s a definite darker undercurrent swirling beneath the cheerful facade.

At this point, two books into the second series, I’m not quite sure if we’ll get a “happily ever after” ending. So many horrible things could still happen to the characters, and Julie Kagawa does a great job of making them characters I care about – there are also a lot of shades of grey in the books, with very few characters irredeemably evil. Good characterisation, excellent world-building, and stories that I don’t find utterly predictable. Yes, the first two days of reading in 2014 were good ones!

Oh yes: two days, eight novels. One of the unfortunate things about writing is that it takes time (at least, if you want to do a good job of it!) Reading takes less time. And I read very quickly indeed. So, books that took months and months to write end up being a couple of hours of entertainment in my hands. I console myself by thinking that if the books are really popular, then the combined time of everyone reading them is significantly longer than they took to write! And, of course, I will reread these books; they are certainly good enough.

Alas, now I need to wait for the next books in the series. And remember that they’re coming out. Yes, because I read quickly, I tend to read a lot of different series and I occasionally have trouble remembering which ones I was reading. A new book in the series is generally the trigger to reread the older books, although not always – once I’ve read a book five times or more, it isn’t so necessary to read it again. (Such as the early Anita Blake novels).

And I need to have a look for other books and series that are available…