It's Fay, Not Fey! (And Please Stop Muttering!)

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The Iron King
by Julie Kagawa

Pub. Date: February 2010
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Format: Paperback, 368pp
Age Range: Young Adult
Series: The Iron Fey #1
ISBN-13: 9780373210084

 

Synopsis from Harlequin Teen

Meghan Chase has a secret destiny—one she could never have imagined…

Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared before her eyes when she was six. She has never quite fit in at school…or at home.

When a dark stranger begins watching her from afar, and her prankster best friend becomes strangely protective of her, Meghan senses that everything she's known is about to change.

But she could never have guessed the truth—that she is the daughter of a mythical faery king and is a pawn in a deadly war. Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she cares about, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face…and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart.

Jennifer's Review of The Iron King

(There are no spoilers in this review.)

As enjoyable as The Iron King was, it was nonetheless a disappointment, because with a touch more attention by the author, it could have been much better. The plot is interesting and moves along nicely, the characters are engaging, and Kagawa’s storytelling keeps the pages turning. Clearly, she did her research into fairy mythology – motif after motif appears, especially in the first part of the book – and that adds an additional layer of realism and pleasure to the tale. But there are two annoying, recurring problems with her writing: one that could have been avoided with a single peek in the dictionary, and one that could have been eliminated had her rewriting process been more diligent.

The first problem is that Kagawa does not understand that the word fey is an adjective, not a noun. It means “fairylike or magical”, or even, “fated to die”. It is not synonymous, as she believes, with the word fairy. The word she was looking for was fay, or its Old French progenitor, fae, both of which are nouns meaning “fairy or elf”. The mistake is especially surprising since Kagawa regularly employs the term faerie, the archaic form of fairy, and since her research is otherwise solid. It may not seem like a big deal until you realize that the word is used incorrectly over and over and over again, starting with the cover of the book (where the series is called “The Iron Fey”, which at best translates as “The Iron Fairylike”). Occasionally, such as when she writes “the fey boy”, the word nearly works, although it is entirely by accident and contrary to her intentions. (I say nearly because the boy in question is a fairy, not just fairylike.) She is not alone in making this error. Other writers have gotten confused, and I have even seen paintings of the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay mistitled “Morgan le Fey” by artists who should know better. But none of that excuses Kagawa nor eases the pain the reader feels at each instance of the word. It is the first law of writing: Know the words you use!

The other problem that drags The Iron King down is that Kagawa succumbs to the “pet word” blight that hampers so many authors’ prose. Even good writers, if they’re not careful, can develop bad habits through oversight or laziness, but there’s no excuse for any writer using the same descriptive word page after page. In this case, there are two words that Kagawa seems unable to stop using: murmur and mutter. Every character in the book does one or the other, or both, at some time or another. It gives one the impression that people are afraid to raise their voices in Kagawa’s Faeryland. What’s worse, the repeated use of a word to describe a character’s actions or manner eventually evolves into a trait of that character in the reader’s mind. For example, the male lead in The Iron King, supposedly a dark and mighty knight, “mutters” or “murmurs” in nearly every conversation he has, making him seem, by turns, unconfident, indecisive, or mawkish. Our heroine’s strength is likewise sapped by her constant murmuring and muttering. But the disease afflicts everyone in the story, and whenever a new character appears on the scene, the reader holds her breath because sooner or later, that character will murmur and/or mutter. The problem reaches its crescendo on page 277 when, in a short conversation, three different characters murmur. This comes in the midst of a staggering display of murmuring in which seven different characters murmur a total of 19 times in 47 pages. (Mind you, many of those pages contain no dialogue.) During this same span of text, when the characters aren’t murmuring, they’re muttering – 15 times in fact. But the muttering really takes off with chapter twenty-one. In 21 pages, three characters “mutter” 11 times (and “murmur” 8). Nearly every conversation has at least one mutterer, and sometimes characters actually trade off muttering.

I had hoped that Kagawa would have reined in her use of those words in Winter’s Passage, the novella that falls between The Iron King and The Iron Daughter. But no, if anything it’s worse. In 59 pages, many of them devoid of conversation, Kagawa uses murmur 21 times and mutter 12. On page 9, in a half-page span of a very short conversation, she outdoes herself. Our dark fae starts it off: “Hold on,” he murmured. Our heroine has a one sentence reply, and then the fae responds: “I don’t know,” he muttered. A couple lines of conversation and a brief descriptive paragraph follow, and then: “Meghan, wake up,” he murmured. Later, in five pages near the end that contain just a few lines of dialogue, our majestic knight, in four brief opportunities, repeats the sequence, first murmuring, then muttering, then murmuring.

This is lazy writing and even lazier editing. Writing is work; rewriting is hard labor. Hard, hard, hard labor. But to make a book its best, the latter must be done with a conscientious effort made to improve what has been written. There is absolutely no excuse for using the same word in every dialogue. In fact, in the majority of cases in The Iron King, there is no reason for either a murmur or a mutter. The transparent “he said” works fine; no word at all works in several places; and as for the rest, they could be varied by “he said tenderly”, “he said softly”, or “she said under her breath”. Take the thesaurus off the shelf and have the characters grumble, grouse, mumble, or speak in an undertone. English is rich in synonyms, and a writer must take advantage of that fact. As much as anything, good prose is about vocabulary and variety. When I’m writing, I dread the third draft because that’s my “word use/overuse” draft. It is weeks of tedium and drudgery as I use my word processor to search the text for instances of a hundred or so different words – those I’ve found that I tend to repeat when the first draft is flowing out. This gives me a chance to polish and strengthen my prose on a word by word basis, and to be certain that my presence as the author is undetectable to the reader (or to the characters).

They are solitary undertakings, the writing and rewriting of a book. Certainly there are times when getting someone’s feedback might be helpful, but if a writer thinks that’s the equivalent of an authorial review of their work, then they are deluded. The burden of proofreading, in particular, should fall solely on the shoulders of the author. No family member, no writing group, no editor, is going to read every single word in a manuscript aloud, as a writer should and must do multiple times. (It is the only way to catch some problems, and had Kagawa done it, or performed the task more thoroughly, The Iron King would have been a much better novel.) A writer owes it to her characters to tell their story in the best way possible, and certainly she shouldn’t be responsible for sabotaging them through something as easily correctable as misused and overused words. It robs their tale of some of its wonder, and while it’s a shame to lose even a little magic from any work of fiction, it is especially unfortunate in one written about the lives of the fae.

(Review originally published March 24, 2011, on GoodReads.com.)