review; heart of iron

Heart Of Iron
by Ashley Poston

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?

Review:

I’ve had this book since it came out, but I hit a reading slump a few months ago, and then there was just a lot of emotional upheaval going on so I never got down to reading it until now.

Some books aren’t worth the wait, but in my humble opinion? This one was.

I haven’t heard a lot about it from people I follow, but I enjoyed it tremendously. It was a story I liked (Anastasia), set in a genre I like (sci-fi/fantasy) with characters I very quickly got attached to. They were flawed and raw and, yes, sometimes predictable, but they were engaging. They were charming and endearing and I was very invested in their stories by the time I was 100 pages in.

Admittedly, there were some things I predicted happening before I got to the so-called plot twists. Some elements that were very obviously laid out as clues that allowed me to figure out certain aspects that might have been twists otherwise. But that could also be attributed to how long I have been reading YA, and the fact that I know what to look for.

I was so relieved when I realised this story had NO LOVE TRIANGLES. Still internally cheering about it. The couples in the story are both different and while one seems to develop pretty fast, in the situation, I could easily suspend my disbelief and enjoy the chemistry between the characters.

Now I have to wait for the next book to know how this ends, and I’m impatient.