bookgazing | 'The Iron Witch'

Donna Underwood never takes off her elbow length gloves in public. She was removed from school after an incident between her and another student. Her father is dead and her mother is in a mental institution. People can be cruel and it’s not surprising her peers call Donna ‘the freak’.

And when Donna thinks about her past she doesn’t exactly disagree with those who ostracise her. She wears the gloves to hide magical iron designs that are embedded in her skin. The designs, which give her super strength, healed her arms after they were destroyed by an evil fairy beast. Her father died saving her. Her mother’s madness is the result of a fairy charm. The adults who surround her are alchemists, members of the ancient Order of the Dragon. They expect her to study magic and defeat wood fairies because her parents were great heroes of the order. No, Donna Underwood is not even close to normal.

At the same time Donna’s life sounds like it was relatively quiet before ‘The Iron Witch’ opened. Within the novel Donna finds her regular routine disrupted over and over by the growing power of supernatural forces. Donna avoided her ex-schoolmates and went to lessons with her tutor. She saw Maker, the man who changed her hands and deals with the pains in her hand. She spent time with her one and only friend, Navin, a cute, bike obsessed boy who isn’t exactly popular, but slips ‘under a lot of people’s cool-dar’. Her daily life involved no regular contact with the dangerous fairy world that scared her physically and emotionally.

Then at the beginning of the book Navin encourages Donna to go to a house party with him. She ends up on the roof with the hot, intriguing host, Alexander Grayson. He seems interested in Donna, which Navin is not pleased about. So, when Donna takes a trip out to the secret location of Maker’s laboratory Navin decides to follow her in case she meets Xan (I know, I know, we will get to that later). At the workshop Donna and Navin find chaos and a wood fairy in the bathroom, which forces Donna to reveal her secrets to Navin.

Personally I found the reasoning that made Navin think following Donna was a good idea, tenuous. I also admit that at this point in the book I wondered if I should be winding up my ‘stalker, stalker’ siren, although it doesn’t take long to work out that Navin is not, through the rest of the book, one of those creepy guys who cares by stalking (and isn’t that faint praise, he’s actually a fun, supportive, brave guy). Navin needed to be in a situation where he can uncover Donna’s secrets, so that the book’s action can move forward. The problem for me is that the way this is engineered hinges on actions and reason that seem under realised to me.

As a case study in contrast the books plot required Xan to become involved in the ‘Donna fights fairies’ action, which means he also had to discover her secrets. The way Xan was manoeuvred into a situation where he could find out her secrets felt more natural to me than the way Donna’s secrets were revealed to Navin. A homeless looking guy turns out to be an evil wood fairy that attacks Xan and Donna on their first date (that’s such a Buffy move by the way, evil kicking dirt all over the magical first date, love that kick ass trope) which leads in the end to secrets being revealed on both sides. There are coherent reasons for why Xan and Donna find themselves in this situation together.

The chapter where the two are first attacked by fairies is one of my favourite action scenes in this novel, which has quite a few well paced action sequences. As well as being a cool moment of fighting and escape, this event leads to Donna and Xan’s relationship developing. Lemme say I know I’m probably supposed to be pulling for Navin to be Donna’s love interest, as he’s the ordinary hero and the friend Donna has known all her life, but I’ve got to say my preference at the moment would be for Xan and Donna to work out. Both Xan and Donna have been victims of fairies, which makes it easier for them to reveal their physical and emotional pain to each other. They are vulnerable together in a way that Donna can’t bring herself to be with Navin even after he knows about the fairy world. And that’s not because Navin is a bad guy, it’s because she feels more comfortable talking to someone who has experienced the same kind of paranormal brutality. I feel like Xan and Donna could heal each other and dude the scene where Xan first reveals his own pain to Donna manages to be both touching and hot, without being unrealistically emotionally full on.

Having a guy like Xan around who knows a lot about the world of fairies means that Donna can share things about her life openly. Donna’s involvement with the order means she has to keep herself pretty emotionally isolated. She’s had to cut herself off from a lot of natural emotions, like grief over her mother’s mental illness, to keep going. She also carries around a lot of guilt over her father’s death and the fact that she can’t tell Navin the full truth about her life hurts her, as he opened up to her when his mother died. ‘Iron Witch’s’ narrative allows Donna to go from a closed off girl, who is basically existing, to a girl who has people she can share everything with. While Donna’s journey to uncover secrets about the order and fight the fairy world is what drives the novel’s plot, ‘The Iron Witch’ is a book that allows space for its heroine to undergo an emotional journey as well, even though this does little to push the immediate action plot on. Do I even need to tell you that a combination of fighting and changing emotions is my preferred mix in stories of paranormal adventure? I mean does a character really win if they come out as emotionally dead as they were before they started tricking, kicking and killing?

My favourite thing about Donna’s own emotional journey is that her feelings often realistically fluctuate, especially in relation to the strength in her repaired arms. In one diary excerpt she is buoyed by the knowledge of her physical strength:

‘I turned to the locker, drew back my fist, and punched it as hard as I could.

With an ear-splitting shriek of metal the whole door collapsed inwards, wrecking the locker beyond any hope of repair. There was a collective gasp from the small audience and I was gratified to see Melanie back up a few steps, eyes wide and staring.

…

At that moment all I gave a damn about was that I had won.’

In other parts of the book she’s feeling pain in her arms and is depressed by the constant reminder of her unnaturalness. Again my personal feeling is that the natural state of heroines in paranormals should be a state of ever changing conflict, because they get awesome powers/feeling of strength/to kill the enemy, but they also get consequences and to wash the blood out of their hair on a Friday night. They operate in both these realities at once, hence conflict. Donna exhibits emotions that change, then change back, then change back again. What’s not to like there? By the end of the book she’s not totally different and she still has a lot of stuff to work out emotionally, which I guess just means there will be more interesting emotions in the coming sequel.

I can feel myself getting invested in the three main characters of ‘The Iron Witch’. However, there’s a problem with ‘The Iron Witch’ that stops me from getting fully connected with them. This novel can be kind of explainy.

At the beginning of the novel Mahoney’s writing is quite natural in the way that it releases and conceals information. The reader first meets Donna as they read a first person diary entry where she recounts the battle in the forest that changed her life. Here Donna feeding of information to the reader feels right, because of the framing provided. She’s writing in her diary, re-telling the event to herself, because she’s seen it in a recent nightmare. At the same time the obvious narrative reason behind all this framing (that the reader needs this information to understand the story) is concealed by the urgency and drama of the scene, or more properly the detailed drama of the reported scene actively informs the reader.

In later parts of the book, written in third person, Mahoney doesn’t recreate this subtle, active dissemination of information and often makes Donna give more information than is required. Donna tends to explain why she knows something about a person, which serves as a way for Mahoney to explain things to the reader, for example:

‘If she sometimes came across as a little strict, Donna realized this was probably because her aunt had never had a husband or child of her own; she was not the most natural mother-figure. And of course, Aunt Paige always seemed too busy for a family, what with full-time work and the demands of the Order.’

These type of comments often feel stiffly inserted into the text, because they provide too much information to seem like the natural thoughts of someone who already knows this information. The use of third person narrative is supposed to make these kind of explanatory details feel less out of place. A third person narrator is outside of the immediate thoughts of the main characters and so generally feels less unnatural when explaining details than a first person narrator, who would need to frame their story as a narrative to an outsider to justify explaining details they are already aware of. The use of third person narrator doesn’t make this kind of explanatory detail feel any more naturally included in ‘The Iron Witch’, possibly because the writing in these places is too self-conscious as it strives for an appearance of naturalness. Throwing in signals to the naturalness of these thoughts like ‘And, of course’ only highlight how strange it is that the reader is having such things explained to them.

There are also passages where explanation is info dumped to set out the rules of the world the characters exist in. Take this excerpt for example, a part of the conversation where Donna explains the Order to Navin :

‘ “It has different names depending on the culture, but the most important thing is what it symbolizes. It’s something to do with ‘all being One,’ and it reminds us that the cycle of death and rebirth might be considered a natural thing. Although death is something that alchemy seeks to overcome.” ‘.

This type of explanation is probably the least bothersome because although this information could have been included more subtly, it is information that the reader needs to operate in Donna’s world. Mahoney works to make the conversation sound natural, by having Navin interject questions and sarcasm, instead of allowing Donna to just rattle through what the reader needs to know. It still doesn’t feel like a natural conversation to me, but then I feel like I’ve become very attuned to picking out teaching conversations in fiction over the last year. As the other kinds of over explanation accumulated I felt a wedge wiggling in between me and Donna which is tough to explain. Maybe it occurred because I was constantly pausing to have something explained to me, so I wasn’t being given as much space as I wanted to naturally absorb an understanding of Donna (although I feel like I do know a lot about her life now). Or maybe the explanation interrupts and slows the rhythm of the narrative too much for me to go deeply under the spell of the story. Whatever the cause the novel does feel stilted in many places because of the large amount of explanatory detail.

Finally, every review has mentioned this, but I thought it was fab, so I will end on a repetitive note. ‘The Iron Witch’ contains a background gay couple who run Donna’s order and are just, y’know together, no big, freaking drama, gay characters are represented in some way in this book. I suspect future books in the trilogy may have a gay villain whose villainy is not a result of his sexuality. I am in favour of that.

Thanks for the review copy, signed in purple ink, Karen Mahoney. I look forward to seeing how the next book in the trilogy develops the characters.

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'The Iron Witch' - Karen Mahoney