I seriously do not get why this trilogy doesn't do as well as Holly Black's Spiderwick books and Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely & Ink Exchange at Kino. It's brilliant. I'm pretty sure I've said before that I enjoy Holly Black's "modern faerie tale" books more than Melissa Marr, (not that I don't heart Melissa Marr!) even though I think Marr's books are better written. Black's characters are just more engaging, more sympathetic. But that's just me, I guess.

While the second book of the trilogy, Valiant, focuses on a different story and different characters in the same world, Ironside goes back to the story of Kaye and Roiben from the first book, Tithe. I was happy enough that I would finally read about what happened to Kaye after Tithe, but then Luis (one of the characters I really wanted to know more about in Valiant) also turned up in the story as well. Oh, what happy reading. Tithe left off with Roiben becoming the king of the Unseelie Court, and Ironside begins with his coronation, during which Kaye was tricked into making a declaration of her love to him and asking him to give her a quest. Wanting to protect her from the war between the courts and not wanting her to join the Unseelie Court, Roiben set her an impossible quest - to find a fairy who could tell a lie.

My favourite parts in the book, though, was when it focuses on Kaye's guilt over living out what was essentially someone else's life (in Tithe it was revealed that she's a changeling), and Corny's grief over his sister's death (Janet was drowned by a kelpie in Tithe), and how it made him feel all this anger and hate towards the fey, but he was still enchanted by and envious of their power over him at the same time. The romance between Corny and Luis was cute and actually more believable than Kaye & Roiben's relationship. There were a couple of plot holes, and the whole quest thing seem to have been ignored for most of the book (until at exactly the right moment, Kaye suddenly figures it out), and I would love it if Kaye and Roiben seem like they're as in love as they say they are. But all of that didn't matter so much, because Ironside is still a pretty great book that I'd recommend to anyone who loves dark fairy stories.