I finished reading "The Iron Thorn" by Caitlin Kittredge late last Friday night. It is a great young-adult novel. I loved it so much I jumped right into the second book,which is why this post is so very very late. My apologies. The bright side is I'm already half-way through "The Nightmare Garden", so that post should be up relatively soon!
This is the first steam punk novel I've ever read (gasp! I hope you aren't too shocked). I adore steam punk music and fashion, but I was struggling to get into the story for about 100 pages and I began to worry that maybe I actually don't like steam punk. Then, very suddenly, I got hooked by the story and Aoife's world. It reminded me of something Steven Galloway said: the first 1/3 of a novel teaches you the rules of reading that novel. So true! It's a brand new world, which entails a lot of back ground world building. It's not the most intense, sexy part of a story, but it is vital to making the story work. And this story? Works like a well-oiled machine. It's gorgeous.
Another confession: I've never read any Lovecraft, and Kittredge uses a lot of Lovecraftian locations and monsters, so I found my self spending a bit of time on the Google-box to flesh out the back ground. I'm not really a horror fan in any format, as I am prone to nightmares, but I suspect this series is a great sort of 'soft-core' introduction to Lovecraft. Horror-lite, if you will. It's perfect for me, and I'm intrigued enough that I may even try an actual Lovecraft novel later in the year. So, please don't take away my 'geek cred' just yet!
This is where my trigger warning comes into effect. I'm maybe a bit old-fashioned, and definitely very uptight, so there are elements of this story that I feel are not so young adult appropriate. At the very least, the idea of my niece or nephew reading it and not fully understanding it makes me a bit squeamish. Aoife is a complex character, and in addition to the many problems all heroine's face (absent parents, pressure to fit in, first love, rescue attempts, bringing down Orwellian dictatorships and breaking worlds), she is also dealing with mental illness. Part of how she copes with her internal pain is by self-harming. It is not a subject I am unfamiliar with, but it was a bit unexpected. Although it really shouldn't be. Kittredge's characters do trend toward the dark and damaged, and there is really no reason why her YA characters would be any different. I haven't been reading much YA recently, but I have noticed that darker themes are becoming more common place, so I'm willing to believe that it's just my naivete that allows me to believe teens aren't already reading these things. All the same, I think I'll wait another four years before suggesting this one to my own niece.
For now, though, I'm going to get back to reading "The Nightmare Garden" - Aoife is in trouble again...
Happy reading!
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