The Iron Flower

Elloren Gardner knows the truth about her world, and there’s no going back. Elloren and her friends were only trying to do the right thing when they rescued a Selkie and freed a military dragon. The last thing they expected was to be thrust into a realm-wide underground resistance against Gardnerian conquest. After just a few months at Verpax University, she’s abandoned her Aunt Vyvian’s more conservative and discriminatory values for the Resistance and is more dedicated than ever to protecting her friends. However, to do so, she is forced to pretend that she’s the same pious, ignorant girl she was at orientation.  

As war looms over the continent of Erthia, Elloren is trying to secure safe passage to the east for her friends. But more Gardnerian soldiers descend on the University, led by none other than Lukas Grey. To complicate things, Elloren is stuck in her own little love triangle, between a Commander who is not all he seems and the mysterious Yvan Guriel, who contains more power and allure than anyone she’s ever known. As his magic calls to her, Elloren finds it more and more difficult to believe she’s truly powerless. However, the last thing Elloren and her friends expected was to be thrust into a realm-wide underground resistance against Gardnerian conquest. 

Outspoken and authentic, Elloren is an inspiring character who studies medicine to help others. She also flaunts University traditions as well as negotiates with queens and renegades. In The Iron Flower, Elloren has found her family, and her relationship with each member becomes increasingly complex. They bond during emotional and traumatic times, but their home soon begins to fall apart with every raid, riot, and murder. Elloren is a force of nature and a lovable character who defies everything she’s ever known for what she knows is right. Her narration is simple and clear, even with all the moving parts, the average reader can’t help but root for her.   

The Iron Flower picks up where The Black Witch leaves off, with Elloren joining the Resistance and Marcus Vogel being elected and cementing power as Gardneria’s High Mage and leader of their government and military. The story includes new and old characters, as well as multiple plot lines, which can make the novel overwhelming and confusing at times. While a lot happens outside of university grounds, Elloren’s own story moves slowly at the beginning, peppered with exposition dumps and emotional turmoil. However, everything speeds up about halfway in and the conclusion is packed with twists and bloody endings. This book successfully builds a believable trajectory of the Gardnerian government’s descent into authoritarianism, while also teaching about standing up to bullies and knowing when to pick your battles.   

Readers who enjoy political intrigue, magical battles, and teenage drama will love The Black Witch Series. The Iron Flower adeptly continues Elloren’s journey through the magical world with powerfully moving tragedies and victories of the Resistance. Elloren and her friends are brave, complex characters who highlight the themes of acceptance, love, friendship, and kindness. The Iron Flower is about hoping for the best, even when nothing seems like it will work out, and it concludes with an exciting cliffhanger that will have readers eager to read the next book in the series, The Shadow Wand.  

Sexual Content  

• Waiting for a Resistance meeting to start, Elloren sees “Iris [tilt] her head and [kiss] Yvan’s neck, nuzzling against him with a soft moan.” Yvan shuts it down before it goes further. 
• Lukas and Elloren reunite after months of no contact. Lukas “leans in to kiss [Elloren], [she] lets [her] lips soften, like sugar melting against his heat.” 
• While at a ball, Elloren talks to one of her friends, Jarod, who is a werewolf with the ability to scent emotions and arousal. He points out two men standing at the fringes of the dancing. Jarod says, “Those two men, they’re madly in love with each other. I can feel it from all the way over here.” 
• When Elloren’s brother, Rafe, and his girlfriend, Diana, sneak into the dance, “he kisses [Diana] deeply” in front of the whole room.  
• As Elloren dances with Lukas, she feels “a sudden, overwhelming desire to be dancing with [Yvan] instead. To feel his lips against [hers]. To have his arms around [her]. And to be close to his fire.” 
• Andras, the child of Amazonian warrior women, describes their fertility rites. The woman who chose him “felt that [his] seed would produce especially fine, strong daughters.” 
• While reviewing Resistance plans with two professors, Elloren remembers that “Diana told [her] about [them]—that they’ve one of the strongest attractions to each other that Diana has ever sensed in any couple.” 
• Lukas announces his desire to marry Elloren, and then he kisses her. “Light as gossamer, he kisses the base of [her] neck, his lips rousing [her] fire lines with a heated longing that tingles straight through [her].” 
• Mid-conversation with one of her friends, Elloren thinks about their marriage rituals, how “the consummation of the sealing union is expected [the] same night, prompting the fastlines to flow down a couple’s wrists as proof of consummation.” 
• After freeing a Selkie from a prostitution ring, Elloren’s friend, Gareth, describes the inside of the brothels. He explains, “They were clothed, though barely. They had them standing in a row for the men to look at. Like livestock at a fair. Most of them seemed scared. A few of them, especially the younger ones, looked completely traumatized.” 
• Elloren’s roommate, Ariel, plans to sacrifice herself so that another roommate, Wynter, can go free. Ariel confesses that she loves Wynter “not as a sister. [She] love[s] [her].”   
• After a succession of traumatizing events, Elloren seeks comfort in Yvan. They have a tender conversation and then “he brings his lips to [hers]. His lips are warm and full and salty from his tears, his kiss tentative as a surprising warmth blooms from where his mouth touches [hers], his heat sliding through [her] affinity lines in a tingling rush.” 
• At the end of the novel, there is a big plot twist that leaves Elloren and Yvan reeling from new information. “He kisses [her] again, his lips growing heated, his fire building and then flashing though [her] lines with a feverish urgency that makes [her] shudder against him.” 

Violence  

• During their first Resistance meeting, Yvan warns the room about a new brutal practice. Elloren’s friend from work, Bleddyn, describes it as “cutting off the points of [Urisk] ears, like [they’re] animals. And shearing the hair from [their] heads.” The Urisk people are commonly enslaved in this novel, though the Resistance is working to free them. 
• While waiting near a military camp for Lukas, Elloren “remember[s] the stories Yvan told [her] about how Gardnerian soldiers set their dragons on the Kelts during the Realm War. How the soldiers wiped out entire villages and burned them to the ground.” Descriptions of war and vague, past violence appear frequently in the book. 
• During the holiday ball, Elloren sees her friend Aislinn, who’s unwillingly betrothed to an abuser, Randall. Randall “roughly grabs Aislinn’s free arm and yanks her toward himself.” In the process, Aislinn “makes a hurt sound and instinctively recoils.” One of Aislinn’s friends growls and threatens Randall, but ultimately, Aislinn leaves with Randall, and no blows come to pass. 
• As Elloren discusses Rafe’s unwillingness to join the army, someone says that if Rafe doesn’t cooperate, “He’ll be shot.”  
• With the fascist government gaining power, Elloren’s friend, Tierney, worries about her aquatic-creature friends. She says to Yvan and Elloren, “[the government has] pounded iron pikes into the waterways. Five of [her] Kelpies are now dead.” 
• On a walk into town with Elloren’s friend, Tierney, Elloren spots graffiti on a wall that says in all caps, “reap the evil ones/Erthia for Gardnerians/take back the western realm.” Once they reach town, they notice a hate crime has been committed and non-Gardnerians have been attacked. They find Bleddyn “only semiconscious, her unswollen eye unfocused.” When she wakes to see Elloren, she “jerks her whole body violently away, her expression twisting into a desperate snarl.” They take Bleddyn home to heal her. Along the way, they find another friend, Olilly, whose ears had been partially but brutally cut off.  
• After finding a Selkie in the woods in The Black Witch, Elloren and her friends are trying to free the rest of them in The Iron Flower. Frustrated at their lack of progress, Elloren yells at Yvan, “They’re beating the Selkies. Raping them!” 
• Since Elloren and her friends can’t free the Selkies on their own, they ask the Amaz for help. During their visit, the Amaz are conflicted over housing Elloren and they almost come to blows over it. Their Amaz appointed bodyguard, Valasca, “pulls out a knife, leveling it at Alcippe,” another Amaz who opposes Elloren’s presence there. There’s a good deal of yelling and physical threatening before everyone backs down.  
• To explain Alcippe’s hatred of men, Elloren’s Amaz bodyguard explains: “When Alcippe was twelve, she returned from tending livestock and found her mother unconscious on the floor. Blood was streaming out of her mother’s nose and ear, and her eyes were swollen shut.” Alcippe murdered her father for his abuse of her mother. 
• Trying to find the valuables of the Selkies, Gareth infiltrates the brothels where they were housed. To describe where they keep the valuables, he says that “All the Selkie taverns have the same [storage] system—apparently, they streamlined things after one Selkie [freed herself] and murdered several people.” 
• On a dark day, a werewolf shows up at Elloren’s footstep with news that all of the werewolves have been slaughtered, save him and her two friends at university. He cries, “I went out to hunt . . . and when I returned . . . I. . . I found them. . . all of them. . . dead. . . our homes turned to blackened ash.” In response to hearing her family was dead from Elloren, one of the last remaining werewolves, Diana throws herself off a building, but she survives.  
• To distract the guard and smuggle her friends to another country, Elloren poisons the university’s students and the guard. The poison isn’t lethal, but it renders everyone unconscious for almost two days. 
• During her escape, Diana gets revenge for the murder of her family. When the guard wakes, they find that “fifteen Gardnerian soldiers are dead. The University groundskeeper is dead, viciously decapitated. The ears pulled clear off a group of Third Division Gardnerian military apprentices.” 
• When the government declares that all Icarals must be imprisoned, Elloren’s bully, Fallon Bane, and her brother watch as “a male Icaral [is] hauled up for execution, two soldiers grasping its arms, the creature’s wing-stumps flapping in panic.” There is no explicit description of his death, but it is implied. 
• At the end of the novel, Elloren’s aunt discovers how rebellious she has become. Aunt Vyvian reveals that Elloren’s uncle is sick, and it is implied that Vyvian is responsible. As Elloren sobs next to him, Uncle Edwin “slumps back, his head lolling, his eyes gazing over,” and he dies. Vyvian’s guards “jump to [Elloren’s] side, roughly pushing [her] back and restraining [her].” Her aunt forces her to marry Lukas, but he lets her go when the process is over. 

Drugs and Alcohol  

• Elloren’s roommate, Ariel, is addicted to an opiate-like drug called nilantyr. When the Gardnerian military raids her room, they seize her stash. There is no description of the raid, only her withdrawal symptoms. Within an hour, Ariel is “starting to tremble,” which soon “worsens to full-body quaking.” Ariel then “vomits all over the clothing she’s pulled from [Elloren’s] drawers.”  
• While visiting the Amaz, Valasca “pulls a flat flask out of her tunic pocket, unstoppers it and hands it to [Elloren].” At Elloren’s hesitance to take it, Valasca says, “Oh, I forgot. You Garndnerians don’t drink spirits.’” Eventually, Elloren gives in and they both drink. Elloren goes to bed drunk. 
• During a visit to the capital city’s prison, Elloren and Yvan notice that the Icaral inmates are being drugged. They see a little girl in a cell with her “white tunic stained down the front with black vomit,” as a “woman appears to be trying to force-feed nilantyr to the child.”  
• When Elloren and Yvan find Ariel in one of the cells, Elloren describes her “gaze [as] unfocused, her mouth curled up at the edges into a numb, blissful grin.” As they try to escape with Ariel, Yvan makes a surgeon and an apothecary eat the nilantyr on their way out, to knock them out and not alert the guards.  

Language    

• Language is very tame, but includes words like stupid, idiot, and hell that appear frequently. 
• The word whore is used three times. 
• Bitch is used twice. 

Supernatural  

• This book features a diverse array of supernatural creatures, including witches, kelpies, Icarals, fairies, elves, werewolves, other animal shifters, Selkies, dragons, green- and purple-skinned peoples, and Amazonian women who utilize rune magic in battle.  
• The Iron Flower has spells, runes, and mentions of magic on nearly every page. Elloren often has dream-like visions of the future that she can never quite remember; things like “a battlefield beneath a reddened sky” or “a white wand gripped in [her] hand.”  
• Their magic is defined by their “affinity lines,” which are how they describe their affinity for certain kinds of elemental magic. One of Elloren’s professors tells her “just because [she] can’t access [her] power doesn’t mean her affinity lines are weak,” meaning that Elloren may have more of an affinity for magic than she thinks. 
• The Amaz are protected by runes, another form of magical spells, where the wielder doesn’t need strong affinity lines. Elloren describes part of the Amaz settlement as “farms set under geometric glass domes marked with huge scarlet runes.” 
• Potions and magical medicines are made in this book. As an example, on a walk into town, Elloren watches as a “disheveled-looking apothecary is busy pulverizing a dragon’s talon into black powder.” Elloren and Tierney gather their alchemy materials from him.  

Spiritual Content  

• During a Resistance meeting, Elloren is informed that “the mandatory wandfasting age for Gardnerians has been lowered to sixteen.” Those over the age of sixteen “will be forced into a fasting” by their religious government.  
• On a walk into town, Elloren spots graffiti on a wall and describes it as “a phrase from [their] holy book. /Bring the reaping times.” 
• Elloren says Gardnerians hate forests because “it’s part of our religion. We’re meant to subdue the wilds. They’re supposedly filled with the spirit of the Evil Ones.” 
• On family weekend at Verpax, the werewolf pack visits and Aislinn’s family “pointedly make[s] the holy gesture to ward off the stain of the Evil Ones.”  
• Elloren explains why Gardnerians have arranged marriages. She says, “Mating is considered sinful in our religion. Its sole purpose is to bring forth as many mages as possible. Mating for any reason beyond that is considered immoral. We’re supposed to rise above our base natures. Not be wild things.” 
• A man and his Amaz mother discuss the werewolves. His mother says that the werewolves are “everything the Goddess despises. And after they die, it will be as if they never existed, whereas [you and I] will go to Goddesshaven.’” 
• Around a campfire, Elloren’s brother, Trystan, remarks that their friends are “all Evil Ones” and that “according to the glorious and most holy Book of the Ancients, [they’re] all Evil Ones. Except, maybe, for [Elloren].” 
• In a political speech to a large crowd, the fascist leader in power claims that the Gardnerians will “flush [the Evil Ones] out of our cities. [They] will flush them out of the wilds. [They] will flush them out of this realm and the next. [They] will flush them out with the full power of the Ancient One behind [them].” 
• While visiting the Amaz, Elloren notices a painting that depicts “the three First Women walking in a beautiful garden with the Great Goddess; the slaying of the cruel male partner by the only faithful daughter; the Goddess rewarding this faithful daughter, naming her Amaz.”