Heart of Iron

Heart of Iron is Ashley Poston's 2018 first instalment in the Heart of Iron series, published by Balzer + Bray and marking her first foray into science fiction after the contemporary settings of Geekerella and The Sound of Us. It reimagines the legend of Anastasia as a fast-moving space adventure, and remains a notable entry in YA sci-fi for the breadth of its cast and the speed of its plotting.

Ana is a scoundrel by nature and an outlaw by circumstance, found as a child drifting alone through space alongside D09, a sentient android with no memory of where either of them came from. Raised since then by a fearsome space captain and the found crew she now calls family, Ana has built an entire identity around protecting D09 - a vital task, since he's one of the last remaining illegal Metals left in the galaxy, and his Memory Loss is getting worse. When a lead on the coordinates to a long-lost ship promises real answers, Ana's plan to steal them is upended by Robb, a spoiled Ironblood boy with his own desperate reasons for wanting the same prize. Neither gets what they came for. Both end up fugitives, on the run together, with no good options left.

What makes this Hidden Identity premise distinctly Poston, even within an entirely new genre for her, is the found family at its centre. The crew Ana calls home - including the sharp-witted pilot Jax, who can read the stars themselves - gives the high-stakes space adventure real emotional ballast, and the Found Family running through the book is handled with the same warmth that defined her contemporary work. Poston tells the story across four interwoven Multiple POV chapters, a structural choice that builds genuine suspense even as it occasionally asks readers to keep several fast-moving threads in mind at once.

The Forced Proximity between Ana and Robb, thrown together as fugitives with no one else to trust, gives their reluctant partnership real tension, and Poston is upfront that this is a book unafraid to let go of characters readers have grown attached to - the stakes here are real, and not every member of Ana's found family makes it through unscathed. Beneath the space battles and political intrigue, the question of who Ana actually is, and what she's spent her whole life trying not to remember, drives the novel toward a Survival and Resilience built as much around identity as around physical danger.

Poston's commitment to Diverse Representation is especially notable here: the crew includes a central same-sex couple, a queer side pairing, and characters of colour and with disabilities, all woven into the worldbuilding with the same unforced normalcy that's become a hallmark of her writing. Reception has been mixed but engaged - some readers find the breakneck pacing thrilling, others wish for deeper worldbuilding to match the scope of the universe Poston is building - but nearly all agree the emotional core, particularly Ana and D09's bond, lands.

For readers drawn to found-family space adventure with a fairy tale skeleton underneath, Heart of Iron sets up a cliffhanger ending that leads directly into its sequel, Soul of Stars.