Ash made a promise to Meghan – he would find a way to be
with her in the Iron Realm, a realm poisonous to the fae. Even if that means
becoming human.
Which calls for a quest – first to find Grimalkin because
he normally knows, well, everything and from there a quest to make Ash mortal.
To find him a human soul. All the while accompanied with Puck for his own brand
of randomness – and the deep underlying pain that still strains their broken
friendship.
A pain that only becomes more acute when they find the surprising
identity of the seer that can guide Ash to humanity – and to Meghan’s side
This book, as can be guessed by the title, focuses on
Ash. Hmmmm…
Ok I’m going to confess a “your mileage may vary” moment,
but I don’t like Ash. I don’t like the whole centuries old immortal falling
head over heels for a teenager after spending 5 minutes with them trope. I don’t
like the idea of a centuries old immortal deciding to give up his life, his
allegiances – just about everything that defines him – to dedicate his whole
being to a teenager he’s known for a month, if that. The whole concept of Ash
from book 1 has annoyed me.
Especially since this relationship defines Ash. His
relationship with Meghan and his relationship with Ariella are pretty much all
there is to Ash. I’ll go a step further and say that the only defining
characteristic about Ash is his angst. He angsts over Meghan and being with
her. He angsts over Ariella and her dying. He angsts over Puck causing Ariella’s
death and further angsts over their broken friendship. He angsts over being an
Unseelie fae and the darkness within him and what that could mean. He angsts
over the politics of the court. He even angsts over all the bad things he’s
done in the past as an Unseelie fae.
Add to this that Ash isn’t exactly romantic and glamorous
in his angst. He sulks, he pouts, he becomes passive aggressive and snarky and
doles out the silent treatment. He’s moody and just a little petulant; I
suspect he looks like a teenager, but he’s supposed to be several centuries
old, we would hope for a little more maturity.
And this book feels like a grand show case for the angst
and every encounter feels like another way to develop more angst into the tale.
Puck comes along with him – allowing lots of angst about Ariella being dead,
lots of angst about Puck loving Meghan and even a side order of angst from Puck
about how he never took his chance to be with Meghan. (And, side point again –
but uckies, ew, creepy! Puck has been watching Megahn since she was a baby. He
watched her all her life until the age of 16. The idea that he missed the
chance to make his feelings known is just intensely, skin crawly creepy here.
She’s 16! He knew her as a baby! Get away from her you creepy creepy person
you).
And the seer – is
she there for any other purpose than to pile on more angst and a love triangle
plot? To have Ash doubt about whether he wants Meghan and to wring his hands
for more moping and angst? We even have a random encounter with some
Thornguards which seems to exist only to bring home to Ash how impossible it is
for him, a Winter Fey, to exist in the Iron Realm for yet more angst about the
hopelessness of it all.
Even the ending is positively saturated with angst
Angst, mope, angst, whine, angst, brood, angst angst angst. Can a dragon eat him now?
Frankly, I have little time for it and had a hard time
dredging through the endless moping. The only redemption came, for me, from the
side characters. Puck is always fun – wild and random and light and carefree
and silly – but always, lurking under there, an edge. He seems so reckless and
silly and playful but underneath there’s always a suggestion of how dangerous
he can be, of how his pranks and japes can easily turn into malice and danger
if he is sufficiently provoked. I like Puck, he’s a fascinating character and
worthy of more time in his own right – once he’s away from Ash and his eternal angst
field that can even make Puck start moping.
I liked Wolf – though I think he lost some of his awe and
the sense of sheer power to him that we got from Winter’s
Passage, he was still an excellent edition and probably a core of the
true nature of what the fae are. Of course, the show was stolen by Grimalkin
who is eternally awesome with some of the best lines, constant, sheer
brilliance and some excellent snark with Wolf (who is an inferior species being
a dog) and added, perfect cat phrases like him not understanding why having not
a shred of loyalty is a BAD thing!? Grimalkin is awesome, he adds a vein of
gold to this book and is one of the main reasons I kept on reading.
The Seer whose name I am trying not to reveal was… not a
good addition. While I liked her portrayal as this excellent, awesome master
manipulator using her seer powers to set everything up for the greater good,
she’s still a figure who exists to sacrifice herself for other people’s
stories. Her whole presence in this book is to be a mystical, self-sacrificing
guide (which Grimalkin does better) and to help add more angst to Ash’s already
overloaded moping bank and ultimately lay down for the greater good. This is
further a problem in that she is the only female character in the book –
certainly to any appreciable degree.
Which compounds with the fact that this is yet another book without a single minority of any kind. That’s 4 books and 2 novellas, it’s not a good record.
The other positive element of the book was the world
building development and underscoring. I’ve always loved the world created in
this series and I think this book did a great job of adding more of the weird
and wonderful. By bringing in the Deep Wyld, the River of Dreams and all the
oddness that comes with it, it truly underscored the oddness, the weirdness,
the alienness of the fae and the beings and powers that make up faerie.
But it also developed so many of the concepts that had already been touched upon. Like how fae do not have souls and are just the creation of human dreams and imagination – which is why it’s vital to the fae that they be remembered by humanity. We see fae fading to nothingness, unable to remember their names after humans have lost them and, conversely, we see Wolf and Puck as both empowered and long lived because they’re such iconic figures who have been remembered over and over. Wolf even joins the group in part because the adventure will be a story that is told ensuring he continues to be remembered.
There was some wonderful development on what names and
promises mean – and the actual consequences of fae breaking a promise. It
underscores just how much promises are inviolate to the fae or they lose their
entire sense of self – or even their existence. The world building was really
well done and keeps me invested in this series.
The story itself was decent. It was linear, we had the
classic magical infallible guards and the group following them and overcoming
whatever monsters or traps were along the way. It was pretty predictable, we
knew they’d get there in the end and none of the encounters were particularly
novel to make the journey particularly new or different – though it did have
many opportunities to show off the world (and Ash’s eternal angst). It wasn’t
badly written and was decently well paced – though still contained a lot of
recapping that felt pretty unnecessary – especially since the recapping feels
like vast pieces of text copied and pasted from previous books. It was a pretty
good dungeon crawl, an adventure with gribbles and fighting that was well
presented and decently interesting and exciting – but I can’t say it was
anything special beyond that
In all, I can’t say I was particularly disappointed in this
book per se because I knew what I was getting into when I realised it was a
book all about Ash the Mopey. But it was a story without any real twists, just
a series of encounters and fights pasted together, heavily intertwined with lots
and lots of angst. We have the continued erasure of minorities and don’t even
have the epic consequences that permeated the other books so well. It closes
the series and tidies up loose ends but I can’t say it thrilled me.
