As the second part to this series of book reviews, I am going to look at a young adult novel I read recently. It isn’t my usual science fiction spec fic, but fantasy instead. I am not usually that big on fantasy but Holly Black has a unique take on it that draws me in.

Imagined Present: Holly Black, Ironside

First I should point out that Ironside is the third novel in a series, of which I have not read the first two. I had read one of Black’s short stories, called “Going Ironside”, that blew my mind. I mean really. I loved the mixture of the world I know with the world she imagined, I loved the idea that a faerie, stuck in this hard world, would seek comfort and find addiction instead. I loved the hardness of the “real world” aspects and the believability of the fantasy aspects. If I am going to read fantasy, this is exactly the sort I want to read. So I decided to find some more.

Not realizing that Ironside was part of a series, I started with that. I feel that I probably would have gained some extra insight into the characters, their histories and their relationships to one another, had I begun with the first two books, which I do plan to buy and read soon, but honestly I don’t think my appreciation of the book suffered too greatly for that lack. It’s a good stand-alone novel and I will review it as such rather than as part of the series.

Ironside is a great book for a misfit! If I had been reading books like this when I was a YA, well… I may have been a very different reader. This is great stuff, the perfect mixture of magic and drama. It’s a story of a pixie changeling, Kaye, disguised as a girl in Ironside, or the human world, who fits into neither the human nor the faerie world. She and her best friend, a queer boy whose past dealings with the faeries have ended in tragedy and bitterness, embark on a quest both to find the human girl whom Kaye has replaced and to find a way to save Kaye’s lover, a sort of dark prince of faeriedom, from being destroyed by the leaders of the Bright Court.

Now if I had just read that paragraph I probably wouldn’t pick up this book. I don’t read much on faeries and I don’t tend to veer far outside the world I believe could exist—which doesn’t often involve faeries. However, Black’s characters are complex and moody, neither good nor bad in any fixed, fundamental way. Kaye is a changeling, part of the human world and living as a daughter of a human mother, yet full of deception, willing to use her magics on humans to get what she needs if necessary. Her best friend Corny is a true and supportive pal, yet he distrusts, for very good reasons, the faeries, including Kaye herself, and resorts to cruelty and violence with them, at times in order to gain information and at times simply to enact revenge. Kaye’s lover, Roiben, is a leader of a dark realm, shaped into his role through a cruelty so intense it leaves him almost unable, at times, to remember another way to function in the world. Humans and faeries alike are susceptible to addiction, vanity and vengefulness. Everyone is flawed and everyone suffers for it.

I love that.

The plot itself is also complex. It starts out like a love story in which Kaye must perform an impossible task for her lover in order to prove her love to him. He of course has set such a task because he cares too much about her to let her become part of the darkness he rules, but she sees it only as rejection. From there the plot quickly turns, however. Corny is cursed by a faerie with a sort of disintegrating Midas’ Touch, Kaye’s human mother discovers Kaye’s identity and freaks out, demanding her real daughter be returned, Roiben’s former lover, now the queen of the Bright Court, sets a course for extreme violence between the Dark and the Light in the faerie land. There is a lot going on, all tied together in intricate and engrossing ways.

The lines between the faerie world and Ironside are thin as onion skin and always shifting, so it is easy to imagine the one world lurking, not necessarily under the world we know, but within it, at certain locus points stronger than at others, almost woven. I think this is the greatest strength of Ironside as a concept. It isn’t a separate world from this one where the faerie folk live; it is this world and it is intimately linked to the people in it. Although the courts of the faerie world suggest an adherence to a medieval history, some of the characters themselves question the court system, suggesting that perhaps the faeries adhere to it only to keep themselves separate from the humans, to preserve something of themselves. It’s a conversation that brings up ideas of colonization, difference, us and them. I was delighted.

If I had to complain about anything with this book, it would be more of a statement as to my tastes than on the novel itself. It’s a young adult novel. It touches on things I want it to touch on, difference, belonging, hatred, love, cruelty, addiction, Otherness… But it doesn’t go quite as far as I want it to go or get quite as dark as I want it to get. It gets pretty dark, though! And the characters have such believable voices. I can really feel these characters, their struggles and angst as well as their victories. I can’t wait to read the first two books!