Salute Your Shorts: Winter's Passage: An Iron Fey Novella by Julie Kagawa

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly (ish) feature here at Bunbury in the Stacks highlighting and reviewing short stories and novellas. Everyone is welcome to join at any time, just grab the pic above and shoot me a link in the comments so that I can include your post in a roundup.

Title: Winter’s Passage [Amazon|GoodReads]
Author: Julie Kagawa [Website|Twitter|Facebook]
Standing: The Iron Fey #1.5
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Published: May 20th, 2010 by Harlequin Teen
Format: Kindle edition; 59 pages.  
Source: Borrowed from my local library.
Spoilers!: This review contains spoilers for The Iron King, reviewed here, so go read that first!

My name is Meghan Chase.  If there are three thing I’ve learned in my time among the fey, they are this: don’t eat anything you’re offered in Faeryland, don’t go swimming in quiet little ponds and never, ever, make a bargain with anyone.

Winter’s Passage picks up right where The Iron King left off, with Meghan leaving with Ash to head to the Unseelie Court.  Meghan successfully pleads with Ash to first visit Puck, who is still recovering and comatose in a tree in New Orleans, and he agrees.  There they meet Grimalken, and are warned of a dangerous pursuer, which continues to hunt them on their journey.

This was a nice little short, but I also found it somewhat annoying.  It’s written as a bridge story between the first and second books for The Iron Fey series, but instead of being written for fans of the series, it is clearly aimed at those who want to do a test-run before reading the full-length novels.  This meant there was a lot of recapping.  I hate recapping.  If I needed that many details about a book I’ve read, I obviously wasn’t paying attention, so why would I then be reading this book?  Seriously, this is one of the reasons I quit reading the Wheel of Time series.

Anyway, this is a quick short, and like most shorts, completely optional and I’m sure it will have little to no bearing on the overall plot of The Iron Fey.  I enjoyed it, but also felt like maybe Julie Kagawa tried to shove too epic of a plot into too short of a page length.  Also, I have to say, I’m a little confused by the Meghan/Ash relationship.  And by confused I mean I don’t like it.  I get the attraction on Ash’s part, Meghan is pretty, clever, brave, and likely the first completely unique chick he’s met in centuries.  He’s warring with his feelings, and that’s fair given she’s all taboo and what not.  I don’t get Meghan’s feelings.  Sure, she acknowledges that Ash is hot, but considering he tried to murder her the first time they met, threatened to murder her the second, tried to murder her best friend and force her into captivity the third, and is clearly ashamed of the way he feels about her, I just don’t get it!  It’s not exactly insta-love, but it does happen way too fast for there to be any depth, and I’m more or less ambivalent about the whole thing (that and I like/pity Puck).

I realize this totally became my platform for discussing romance in The Iron Fey, but what’re you gonna do?  I’m just gonna say, Winter’s Passage was a nice quick read, but I could really take it or leave it as far as the series goes.  Cheers!

Roundup: 
Check out Alyssa’s review of Faery Tales and Nightmares by Melissa Marr at Books Take You Places
AND Anna's review of The Lepidoctor by Mick Jackson at Pocketful of Books!