Finished The Lost Prince by Julie Kagawa. I received a copy from the publisher on Netgalley.
Summary (from Goodreads):
“Don’t look at Them. Never let Them know you can see Them.That is Ethan Chase’s unbreakable rule. Until the fey he avoids at all costs—including his reputation—begin to disappear, and Ethan is attacked. Now he must change the rules to protect his family. To save a girl he never thought he’d dare to fall for.
Ethan thought he had protected himself from his older sister’s world—the land of Faery. His previous time in the Iron Realm left him with nothing but fear and disgust for the world Meghan Chase has made her home, a land of myth and talking cats, of magic and seductive enemies. But when destiny comes for Ethan, there is no escape from a danger long, long forgotten.”
I love the Iron Fey series, so I was very excited to see that the story continued, this time from Ethan’s perspective. When last we saw Ethan in the series, he was a little kid. Now he’s a teenager and incredibly surly. Part of that is because he’s a teenager but most of it is because he doesn’t want anyone to get to close to him because if they do, the fae could use that relationship against him.
But while he’s spent much of his life pretending that he can’t see them and doesn’t know about them, eventually he can’t pretend anymore and has to do the one thing he swore he’d never do: go back to the Nevernever and find Meghan.
Ultimately, though, this novel didn’t really work for me and I almost gave up on it—until Ethan ended up back in the Nevernever. I think ultimately I don’t love the world anywhere near as much as I love Meghan (and Ash and Puck) and the promise of getting to see one or all of them kept me going.
I’m not sure where the disconnect came from, although part of it may be that I didn’t really like Ethan, even though I understood why he acted the way he did. I find that I love books so much more when I like the people in them. And I didn’t really care about Kenzie, although I liked her far more than I did Ethan.
Even so, while the first half or so dragged for me, I liked the second half much better. (Basically from the part where Ethan enters the Iron Realm.)
