I don't read too many faery books for a reason, well, a few reasons actually: 
 1: There's not too many faery books out there (that I know of and that seem worth reading) 
 2: There aren't too many well written faery books out there (that I know of) 
 3: Faery books are either hit or miss for me and I usually end up being pretty disappointed in the end. 
 4: The stories in general usually just suck. 
 I mean, I've read some okay faery stories in the past, but none have yet to blow me away. And so, the search continued for the great faery novel... 
 Now I had heard about The Iron King a lot. So far, this series has gathered quite a sizable fan base with it's readers. That's always a good sign, right? The summary never really caught my eye however, so I put off reading this book for awhile. And then, out of sheer desperation for a vacationing read, Walmart's crappy selection of books called to me, and thus, enticed me to pick up The Iron King. 
 All right, so going into this book, I didn't have high expectations, but I was secretly hoping for The Iron King to bring something fresh, new, and creative to the field of YA Fantasy. Right off the bat though, my dreams were shattered. *sighs* 
 So the first thing that really bugged me about this book was the main character, Meghan Chase. To me, Meghan came off sounding very...whiny. And I know that Meghan is supposed to be sixteen, but honestly, the way Julie Kagawa wrote her voice, Megan comes across younger than that, more like thirteen or fourteen. Meghan continued to annoy me throughout the book till the very end as well but I will get into more of that later. 
 Queue predictable story line...So here we have our everyday, ordinary, plain Jane that is Meghan Chase. Oh, look at how normal and average she is! Listen to how she whines and complains about everything that happens to her! Watch how pitifully sad she is when she doesn't stand up for herself against the school bullies! Ah yes, just your typical, run of the mill, spineless, sad, little girl. Don't you just feel the pity?! I don't... Well, very quickly we find out that our terribly normal, pitiful little heroine isn't quite as normal as we had originally thought. She's the daughter of the Seelie King which makes her a half faery (and apparently a very powerful one at that). Shocking!!! Now here comes the selfless quest into Nevernever, the faery realm, to find Meghan's younger brother and save him from the very evil Iron King. 
 Robbie/Puck was useless. He annoyed the crap out of me to be quite honest. Every time he has a conversation with Meghan, he always has to address her as 'princess'. Not only was this annoying, but it was also a serious spoiler at the beginning of the book. I also just didn't like Puck's prankster, sarcastic personality in general, but I thought that it was kind of neat how he was the same character taken from A Midsummer's Night Dream from Shakespeare. 
 I hate talking, animal sidekicks. I thought that the idea of Grimalkin, the cat, was good, but I didn't like how big of a role he ended up playing in the rest of the book. His character just didn't seem necessary at all for plot or character development. It was more like he was there just for the sake of being there. 
 Prince Ash. Goodness me, what can I say about Ash. Well, for starters, he's apparently gorgeous according to Meghan. He also happens to be the son of Queen Mab, ruler of the Unseelie court. This practically makes Meghan and Ash mortal enemies and on countless occasions, Ash even threatens to kill her. Dangerous much? I seemed to think so, but Meghan obviously fell head over heels for him. This only confirmed my theory that I had constructed early on in the book: Meghan is stupid. Later on, Ash is shown to be some tortured soul who we should all pity because he lost his true love to a wyvern (at least I think it was a wyvern. At this point I had already stopped caring). Disappointingly, Ash turned out being no different from every other romantic interest in today's YA Fantasy fantasy genre. 
 In terms of dialogue, it was incredibly stiff and unrealistic in my opinion. Not to mention, all of the characters were very two dimensional. Character development, especially on Meghan's part, was minimal if not nonexistent. Only a few times did I think the prose was brilliant, though I did enjoy the descriptions that Miss Kagawa crafted of Nevernever. But all in all, this was a pretty crappy book. Will I be picking up the sequel? Only if I'm really, really desperate.