Meghan Chase and the Faery Prince I Shouldn’t Root For

Meghan Chase Has a Very Bad Birthday

Here’s the setup, and I promise I’ll keep it spoiler-light. Meghan Chase is sixteen, poor, invisible at school, and living with a stepfather who can’t be bothered to remember her birthday. Then her little brother gets swapped for a changeling (a creepy, pitch-perfect horror image that Kagawa does not linger on nearly long enough, in my opinion) and Meghan has to cross into the Nevernever, the parallel faery realm, to get him back.

The Nevernever is split into the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, ruled by Summer and Winter respectively, and then there’s the Iron Realm, a newer, scarier faction made of technology and human belief, which nobody in the old courts wants to acknowledge exists. That’s the concept that got me. Not the love triangle, not even Meghan. The idea that iron, the thing that’s always killed fae in folklore, is now growing its own court because humans stopped believing in magic and started believing in machines. That’s a genuinely smart bit of myth-updating and it’s the backbone of the whole series.

Along the way Meghan gets a chaperone in Grimalkin, a cat who talks in riddles and steals every scene he’s in, and reconnects with Robbie, her childhood best friend, who turns out to be Puck, actual legendary trickster Puck, and has apparently been in disguise as a human teenager for years. Which, fine. Sure. And then there’s Ash.

The Prince, the Problem, and Why I Kept Reading Anyway

Look, I have to talk about Ash first because everybody talks about Ash first. He’s the Winter prince, ice cold (literally, his touch can frost things over), sworn enemy of Puck, and he’s the one assigned to escort or possibly kill Meghan depending on the day. He is a type. You have met this type before, in a dozen other books, and you will meet him again. But Kagawa writes the slow thaw between them with genuine control. There’s a scene where he teaches her something small, almost domestic, and it lands harder than any of the “epic” magic battles in the book because it’s the first time he’s not performing indifference. That’s Kagawa at her best: small gestures doing the emotional work the plot is too busy to do.

Here’s the thing though. Meghan herself is a weak link for a big chunk of book one. She spends a lot of early chapters being led around, rescued, and explained to, rather than acting. I don’t think this is a moral failing on Kagawa’s part so much as a symptom of when this book was written. 2010 YA fantasy is full of heroines who start passive and grow a spine over a trilogy, and Meghan does grow one, just not fast enough for my taste in the first book. I found myself getting impatient with her around the second act, wanting her to make a choice, any choice, instead of reacting to whatever Ash or Puck decided for her.

And yes, the love triangle. I know. I know. Puck is the safe, warm, familiar option and Ash is the dangerous, forbidden one, and if you have read approximately one YA novel since 2008 you already know the shape of this. It doesn’t ruin the book but it does date it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bored by triangle mechanics even as a teenager reading this the first time, and rereading it as an adult I noticed the scaffolding more than I wanted to.

What genuinely surprised me on reread was how good the horror elements are. The Iron Realm and its wretched, oil-slicked creatures are legitimately unsettling, more Guillermo del Toro than Twilight, and I wish Kagawa had trusted that tone more instead of cutting back to romance beats so often. There’s a real gothic nastiness lurking under all the swoony court politics and I wanted more of it.

The old fae fear iron because it kills them. What nobody wants to admit is that it’s already winning.

About Julie Kagawa

Julie Kagawa grew up moving around a lot as an Army brat, which maybe explains why she’s so good at building whole worlds with borders and rules and courts that don’t like each other. She was working as a bank teller in Louisville when she wrote The Iron King, sold it, and turned it into a career writing about faeries, vampires, and dragons back to back, sometimes overlapping. She’s prolific in a way that a lot of writers pretend to be and aren’t. Say what you want about the triangle, the woman does not miss a deadline, and there’s something admirable about a career built on actually finishing books.

If This Wrecked You (or Just Kept You Up Past Your Stop), Read These Next

If Ash’s frozen restraint did something to you, or the Nevernever’s court politics scratched an itch, here’s where to go next. You can grab a copy of the book here: The Iron Fey on Amazon.

• Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr, for a darker, more sexually charged faery court story with a heroine who has actual agency from page one.
• Tithe by Holly Black, if you want the grittier, meaner, more adult cousin of this world, less romance, more teeth.
• The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, for a Winter Court style prince who is actually cruel instead of just broody, and a heroine who claws her way to power instead of being handed a destiny.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, if what you actually wanted was the adult version of this exact premise, faery courts, forbidden romance, higher stakes.

For your book club

1. Does the Iron Fae concept, technology and belief creating a new kind of magic, hold up as social commentary, or does it feel like a gimmick by book’s end?
2. Is Meghan’s passivity in the first half a fair reflection of a scared sixteen year old, or a structural weakness in the writing?
3. What does Ash’s arc say about the “redeemed by love” trope? Did you buy his change, or did it feel rushed?
4. Puck versus Ash: be honest, did you actually feel torn, or did the book tip its hand too early?
5. If you read this as a teenager versus as an adult, what changed about how you experienced it?