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An Irish Myth for the Modern Lass
Brenna Morgan and The Iron Key
Brenna Morgan
Young Adult Fantasy
Fire and Ice YA
May 2, 2017
Kindle E-book
317
When sixteen year-old Brenna Morgan arrived in Ireland with her travel-writer mother she had expected the usual—a couple of months in a country that wasn’t her home. What she hadn’t anticipated was making a promise to a dying faerie who saves her life. Armed with only her wits and a strange iron key given to her by the faerie, Brenna is pulled into a world where myth and legend cross all too often into reality, in search for a child hidden away in their world.
Knowing nothing of the faerie realm, she is aided in her search by new found friends Patrick and a reluctant faerie named Roibhilin with a grudge against humans. But the more she uncovers the more she realizes that not all is as it seems, that danger comes in the most unassuming of guises, and that the child she is sworn to protect could destroy not only the faerie world but her own as well.
A Modern Girl’s Disaster Filled Waltz with the Fairies
Brenna Morgan had lived a life without roots, moving around the world with her parents, who write for a travel magazine. She has lived a life that sounds exciting and exotic, but her deepest desire is to make friends, and go to school…to be a normal teenager. Much to her surprise, both of these things happen when she arrives in Ireland with her mother…at least to a certain degree. While Brenna makes friends easily, and is allowed to enroll in school, her life is anything but normal! 
On her second day in Ireland, she meets a dying fairy, who entrusts her with an iron key, and with a quest to find and protect a special young girl, who is a member of the fairy realm. Danger abounds within the fairy realm for a mere mortal like Brenna, but like the heroes of ancient Irish mythology, she is determined to keep her promise and to protect the innocent.
Brenna Morgan and The Iron Key is a fun YA tale, which touches on many aspects of Irish mythology, from the Fairy Mounds and Finn McCool, to the leprechauns and the Morrigan. Brenna is very heroic, never seeming to doubt the importance of doing what is right, even if it means martyring herself…this can make her a bit trite and unrealistic at times, but this is made up for with her stilted friendship with a proud fairy noble and romance with her dreamy Irish lad. The plot has a fair number of twists and turns, with enough surprises to keep the story from being too predictable, as is sometimes the case with YA 
books. That being said, I would not necessarily recommend this book to adults, since the protagonists are all unapologetically teenagers…but I think teen readers would devour and enjoy this story.
Beyond its typical YA attributes of blooming romance and teenagers saving the world, this book does pose some important questions for young readers to think about. For example, how does trust shape parent-child relationships, how important is independence, how much say do we have in our destinies and about who travels the road of life with us? Most importantly, how do the choices made now shape that road of life tomorrow? Overall, this is a good, short read, which I will definitely be recommending to my students for their summer reading lists!
