Review – Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron, Book 1) by Ashley Poston (5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Science Fiction
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 480 pages
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Release Date:February 27, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-0062652850
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Heart of Iron series
Source: Owlcrate
Rating: 5/5 stars

“Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09—one of the last remaining illegal Metals—has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.

Ana’s desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn’t care what he’ll sacrifice to keep them.

When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them—and the coordinates—and not everyone wants them captured alive.
What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives—and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana’s past returns, she must face an impossible

choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?”

This is the first book in the Heart of Iron series. I really enjoyed this epic start to a new science fiction YA series. I love the world in this book, the characters, the adventure, and the intrigue. This was an amazing book that was hard to put down and very well written.

The book switches between a number of different POVs, which was really well done and worked great in this book. The story mainly focuses on Ana (young woman who is part of a pirate crew), D09 (an Android who is Ana’s companion and protector), Robb (brother to the next Emperor), and Jax (pilot on the pirate crew and a different type of humanoid race that can look into the future).

This book does couple-off these characters, so there is romance in the story. However, I was impressed by the world-building and depth of the story. I loved the whole storyline behind Ana’s past and the Metals. There’s a lot of food for thought here and this revisits that whole “ghost in the machine” theory that sci-fi books love to dive into.

The book is very well written. The writing flowed beautifully and was very fun to read. This is a long book, but it doesn’t feel long. The book stops at a good place but I am already dying to read more about these characters and this world.

Overall this was an amazing start to a new sci-fi YA series. I really enjoyed this book a lot and found it to be an easy, engaging, and highly entertaining read. There is a great balance of action, adventure, politics, world-building, interesting characters, and romance in here. I would definitely recommend if you are into YA sci-fi books.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– New Release Reading Challenge
– Goodreads Reading Challenge