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Worlds Without End Blog

WoGF Review: Ironskin by Tina Connolly Posted at 1:42 PM by Barry F.

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WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeIn his youth, Barry F. (bazhsw), really enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy, and then stopped for the best part of twenty years. In 2012 Barry made a committment to “read more science fiction” and decided the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge would be his launchpad.


IronskinThe central character of Ironskin is Jane Eliot.  She was injured by a fey bomb towards the end of the Great War trying to save her brother.  The injury causes her to leak her curse and project that emotion onto others – her’s being rage.

The effects of the curse can be countered by iron and consequently Jane wears an iron mask that stops the curse from affecting others but does cause those emotions to build up inside her and others like her with no outlet.

Jane struggles to keep employment before accepting a governess job where she believes the child could use her help.  This is her entry into the mysterious world of Mr Rochart and the foreboding Silver Birches.

Ironskin is a retelling of Jane EyreJane Eyre is a book I treasure and have gone back to many times.  I have also been sympathetic to retellings and additions to the ‘Eyre’ canon – in particular I find Wide Sargasso Sea an essential  ‘prequel’ and puts a significant twist on the original.

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WoGF Review: Ironskin by Tina Connolly Posted at 8:30 AM by Emily Sandoval

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WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeEmily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.


IronskinWhen the 2012 Nebula Award nominees were announced, I was pleased to find I had read (and enjoyed) four out of six in the Best Novel category.  The fifth has been on my reading list for a while.  The sixth, the only one I’d never heard of, was Ironskin by Tina Connolly.

I picked it up so quickly in part because of some idiot comments floating around the web about the genre becoming too girly, and it made me happy that books like this are starting to get serious recognition.  Once I read the description, I was curious about what made this book so special that both it and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass were included on the shortlist (both being alternate histories in the regency era).

Ironskin is a retelling of Jane Eyre with fey.  Unlike Glamour in Glass, where society is practically unchanged by the addition of magic, Connolly’s world is dramatically different.  Society had become dependent on fey technology, powering everything from lights to motor cars with magical “bluepacks”—until the Great War.  The story starts five years after the war’s end.  The fey are gone, but the country is left devastated, and scrambling to make do with coal and steam.  A generation of young men is slaughtered, and many unlucky survivors are left with fey curses that can only be suppressed by covering the scars with iron.  Jane Eliot is one such ironskin, hiding her deformed face with an iron half-mask.

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