Friday, May 8, 2020

Review: Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston

Heart of Iron
(Heart of Iron #1)
Publication Date: February 27, 2018
Hardcover, 467 pages, Balzer + Bray
Genres: YA, Sci-Fi

Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09—one of the last remaining illegal Metals—has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.

Ana’s desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn’t care what he’ll sacrifice to keep them.

When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them—and the coordinates—and not everyone wants them captured alive.

What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives—and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana’s past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?

My Review

Anastasia retellings in space with androids and gay protagonists? I’m here for it. It just took me a couple extra years to finally pick this one up, but once I did, I was hooked.

Heart of Iron presents a fun and interesting world that’s not too deep and very easy to follow. And in the age of A Song of Ice and Fire, The Expanse, and the Throne of Glass series, books that you can pick up and flip through without having to keep a mental map of character names and backgrounds are a blessing.

I decided to start reading this book on a whim, but I was hooked from the beginning. It’s fast-paced, and the adventure in the first half was super fun and intriguing. However, the middle slogged a bit. Things slowed down too much when all of the characters were at a standstill, but thankfully, the story picked up towards the end, and now I’m ready for book two.

To help keep that fun, SFF feel, there’s a cool mix of fantasy-like storylines and creatures in this one. Jax is sort of a fae/elf-like creature, but he’s in space! Space elves are a very, very cool concept. For this reason and many others, Jax and Robb were my favorite POV characters. Jax has such a cool background (again, SPACE ELVES!), and Robb is a clueless cinnamon roll. I will say, though, that their relationship developed a little too fast in that middle section of the book. I was a tad disappointed that there wasn’t as much romantic tension. Hopefully, the second book brings that tension back into play somehow. As for Ana and D09, they were fun too. I had no issues with their characters; I just liked Robb and Jax more.

All in all, Heart of Iron is a fun palette-cleanser between chunky SFF reads. It’ll give you all the fantasy and sci-fi vibes you need, while still keeping things rather simple and fast-paced.



*Note: I purchased a copy of this book myself. This in no way affected my opinion/review.

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