Ironside by Holly Black

Ironside, a Modern Fairy's Tale is book 3 in a very older, young adult book series. While the books are interesting reading, I would definitely not recommend these books to the same readership as the Spiderwick Chronicles.

Ironside is definitely written for a teen girl audience. It pushes the boundaries having a homosexual male "side-kick" to our tough-as-nails pixie main character. It has an honorable knight unwillingly crowned as king of the underworld (very Persephone/Hades, and indeed makes the connection so the reader doesn't have to.)

While I enjoyed it, Ironside is not for everyone. If you are a teen aged girl, into fantasy, and not bothered by what may be in the "dark" side of faerie, then this is the book for you. It's much in the style of the current sensations of The Luxe, Libba Bray's series A Great & Terrible Beauty and Blue Bloods by Melissa De La Cruz. They are modern tales, presumably for a more "modern" girl, in the sense that modern means "shocking."

I guess this is the new trend: Darker, edgier, bloodier, and more fantastical than ever before. With Twilight's opening weekend raking in 70+  million dollars, I guess this is the answer to Stephanie Meyer's almost clinically "clean" vampire novel.