Book Review: Iron Core by Rebekah DeVall

Everything will be okay.
Deep in Brancaleone, a prison carved from the mountainside, eighteen-year-old Lunetta plans her escape. Raised behind iron bars, all she wants is freedom – and to take her mother with her.

Iron Core is the first book in a series about Lunetta, and it’s more of a prequel if I understand correctly. It’s somewhere between a short story and a novella – only five chapters – and it does what it’s intended to do in introducing Lunetta and the key people in her life.

My first comment is that it gets a bit tell-y in places, where the author told something that would have been more effectively shown, particularly in regard to Lunetta’s history with Erec.

The dialogue also didn’t feel particularly natural to me in a lot of places, like it was too on-the-nose or didn’t quite fit the relationships between the characters in some spots.

I also felt like it was clipped in a few places, like there could have been more time spent describing places or there could have been more action amidst the dialogue sometimes, and the ending transition felt awkward to me, more like there is no transition. I feel like we needed more lead-up specifically to the transition than there was.

However, I did enjoy this book (I’m just better at pinpointing what I thought was wrong with a book than at pinpointing what was right with it. It’s annoying.) and I’m interested to see more of Lunetta and the world she lives in. I think the characters could probably gain more depth in a longer work, so I’m interested to read the longer stories in Lunetta’s series.

About the author:

Rebekah DeVall prides herself on being the girl who wrote 200,000 words in 21 days. She’s a Christian author with a penchant for killing characters and a love for writing real female protagonists described as “the example of a Christian hero that young readers need to see.”