Scarlet - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #2)

Scarlet is the second book in the Lunar Chronicles series and is the last book of the series I need to review' life's funny like that, innit?

This book both continues Cinder's story as rogue moon princess and introduces a new character, Scarlet.  The main setting here also shifts to France, where Scarlet lives and is looking for her recently-disappeared grandmother, who was also involved with Cinder's relocation from Luna to Earth, though Scarlet doesn't know it.  The new romantic interest for Scarlet, Wolf, also takes the scene, as does Carson Thorne, an American deserter with a stolen spaceship who falls into Cinder's company.  Kai is also still involved, dealing with the drama of Cinder's escape and rising tensions with Luna from the palace in New Beijing.

Cinder starts coming into her own as a moon-princess-badass here, and Scarlet quickly sets herself up as someone who is not to be messed with.  Scarlet is a typical "fiery redhead" character, which is a bit lacking in originality, but at least her hair is only mentioned twice instead of being harped on for the whole book.  Her "Little Red Riding Hood" story is queued up with her signature red hoodie and, of course, Wolf, as well as a brief encounter between Wolf and a street fighter named Hunter.  There's a bit of a twist in this book, one that I don't think was as evident as the "twist" in Cinder, but reading it through a second time it's pretty obvious where the story was going.  Still, I found the story to be enjoyable.  This is also more of a romance than Cinder was, with a strong bond between Scarlet and Wolf from the beginning, even though both admit that it doesn't make sense.

This isn't a very complex story, and I think that Scarlet's part of it actually moves more slowly than Cinder's story initially did.  Meanwhile, Cinder's story picks up pace as she and Thorne flee New Beijing and try to determine their next steps.  Thorne is a delightful character, someone who thinks that he's much more charming than he actually is and with a checkered past that he tries to spin in the best light possible.  This all sets him up wonderfully as a true hero in the next book, when he see him through a different pair of eyes.  Iko also makes a return to the page here, and she is just as wonderful as ever.  Cinder herself is also a stronger character than she was before, gaining a true determination and sense of self that she lacked in the first book.

Overall, this is a great book, a strong continuation of the series and, I think, better than Cinder itself was.  On the re-read, I'm not quite as dazzled with it as I was the first time I read it.  When I do my re-read of Cress, we'll have to see if Scarlet can retain its place as my favorite book in the series or if it will be overturned.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Cinder - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #1)

It feels a bit weird reviewing this book so long after I put out my first review on this series, for Cress.  I had read Cinder before, but I wasn't writing reviews at the time, and so this comes to anyone following along a bit out of order.  Cinder was the Unapologetic Romance Readers' theme read of "A sci-fi romance" for September 2017, and I was delighted to have an excuse to re-read it, especially as I'd been in a bit of a reading slump and going back to books I've previously enjoyed always helps with that.

Cinder is, as you can guess from the title and cover, a Cinderella story.  Except this Cinderella is a cyborg.  Injured in an accident she can't remember, Cinder has been left with a mechanical arm and lower leg/foot, with wires in her brain and nervous system and an interface that flashes information over her eyes.  She's also one of the best mechanics in New Beijing, and her business is her step-family's main (only?) source of income.  Oh, and New Beijing, and the rest of the world, are currently being ravaged by a plague with an unknown cause and no cure.  But one day, when Prince Kai stops by Cinder's stall to get an android repaired, Cinder is pulled into a web that she never imagined and that will destroy--or rebuild--her entire life.

I love this story so much.  It follows a very traditional Cinderella structure, but with little flourishes and garnishes that make it seem new.  The pumpkin coach is a decrepit car, the glass slipper is a cyborg foot.  The characters are also wonderful; while Meyer makes Cinder's stepmother absolutely loathsome, the daughters aren't entirely without redemption, particularly Peony, who Cinder actually likes.  And then, of course, there's Iko, Cinder's android sidekick who has a quirky, perky personality all her own.  Adding the plague and the brewing conflict between Earth and Luna adds dramatic tension to a story that traditionally lacks it, and having Prince Kai and Cinder meet and grow closer multiple times before the ball is absolutely necessary--the "love on first site" aspect of Cinderella has never sat well with me, so I appreciate this added relationship building.

That said, this isn't a perfect story.  It has a bit of a cliffhanger ending, which I didn't remember.  Given the narrative arc of the series as a whole, I can see why Meyer had to break it where she did, but it definitely doesn't lead to a satisfying conclusion for this volume.  And while the Cinderella element helps to tie together a story and genre that could otherwise alienate some readers--I probably wouldn't have normally picked up a story about a cyborg--it also means that, despite the flourishes, the plot itself can be quite predictable.  Of course, the story as a whole goes past the Cinderella story, but that doesn't mean that parts of it can't be called from a mile away.

Still, I really enjoyed rereading this.  It's not my favorite book in the series--that goes to Scarlet--nor does it feature my favorite main characters--that would be Cress--but I still think it was a solid intro volume, and would definitely recommend it to others.

4 stars out of 5.

Stars Above - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #4.5)

It's become popular in recent years to YA authors to write a slew of short stories that accompany their full-length works.  Marissa Meyer is no different in that, around the time she released Winter, she also released this volume, Stars Above, comprised of short stories set in the Lunar Chronicles universe.  Most of them deal directly with the main characters from the series.

I'm a firm believer that authors don't "owe" short stories like this to their readers, and that when they're written, they typically don't really add much to the series.  That's definitely the case here.  There are nine stories of varying lengths in this book, and eight of them, while enjoyable, are just fine.  They don't really add anything to the Lunar Chronicles experience that wasn't laid out in the main works.  Yes, the stories expound a bit more upon things that were just mentioned in the main works, but they don't resolve any plot holes or offer any big revelations.

The big exception to this, as other reviewers have noted, is a wonderful gem of a story called "The Little Android."  It deals with none of the characters from the main books, though just as each main heroine's story was patterned after a fairy tale, so is this.  The story here is, of course, "The Little Mermaid," except the mermaid is an android who'd developing a personality and emotions of her own.  It's a beautiful, heart-wrenching story that fits into the world and helps expand on it without feeling the need to pander to fans.  If the stories in the collection had all been like this, I think I would have had a much higher opinion of the book as a whole than I actually ended up with.

The other stories are just okay.  There's one about Michelle Benoit getting Cinder and Scarlet, one about Cinder going to live with the Linh family, one about Wolf becoming a recruit in the Lunar army, one about Thorne while he was in school, one about Cress going to live in the satellite, another with background on Winter and Jacin, Cinder and Kai's meeting from Kai's perspective, and finally one that takes place after the end of the main Lunar Chronicles which details Scarlet and Wolf's wedding.  That was a cute one, but again, nothing that I absolutely couldn't live without and that I hadn't figured would happen anyway.

Overall, this is a cute addition to the series and it looks nice on the shelf, but there's only one real gem here.  Writing short stories is an art that requires a completely different set of skills than writing full-length novels, and if it hadn't been for "The Little Android," I would think that Meyer hadn't quite honed those skills yet.  "The Little Android" absolutely glowed, though, and I wish Meyer had taken the time to expand her universe rather than just her already-established stories, because that universe expansion is definitely what worked best here.

3 stars out of 5 for the whole.

Winter - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #4)

Last month I read Cress because I thought Winter was coming out like three days later, only it wasn't.  So I had to have the agonizing one-month wait until it actually did come out, which was yesterday, November 10th.  So, obviously, I took the day off work to read it in one go.  Was it a good decision?  Does Winter stand up to its predecessors?  Well...

It was an okay decision, and while Winter was good, I don't think it was excellent.  I really enjoyed it, but it suffered a lot of the same problems as Cress did, but on a larger scale.

Winter is the conclusion to the Lunar Chronicles, which follow Cinder, a cyborg, as she discovers that she's actually a moon princess with mind-control abilities who has to wrest the throne back from her evil aunt Levana.  Along the way, she falls in love with a prince, picks up a bunch of sidekicks, and pretty much has to save the world.  Each book in the series adds a pair of main characters as a new fairytale-inspired couple: Wolf and Scarlet, Cress and Thorne (though Thorne first showed up in Scarlet) and Jacin and Winter (again, Jacin and Winter showed up before, but weren't main characters).  Winter rises to MC status in her titular book, but I don't think it was as well-done as Cinder and Scarlet's stories were.  Which comes back to the biggest issue I have with the series...

There's a lot going on.  It's not hard to follow, necessarily, but with 8+ main characters running around at the same time, it means that no one really gets the page time they should.  Winter probably gets the second-most page time in the book, after Cinder (who is really THE main character, let's be honest) but considering this book had her name on the title, I didn't think that Winter had a very prominent roll.  She's supposed to be Cinder's crazy princess cousin, who can't ever actually rule because she doesn't have any royal blood, and who has gone insane because she refused to use her gift for glamour.  There's some good background there, but because there's so much going on, Winter just doesn't get the same degree of development as the other characters because she came to the game so late--even her Snow White plot kind of gets lost in the fray.

While Cinder and Winter got a good amount of page-time, and Cress and Thorne probably got the second-most, Scarlet and Wolf once again got shoved to the side.  Scarlet's not even present for a large chunk of the book as she's still locked up in the menagerie as Winter's "pet."  Once she gets free, she and Wolf are reunited for a brief period--and then he gets taken prisoner and is completely absent for a long time.  Meanwhile, Scarlet gets sidelined by Winter, meaning that even after she re-enters the fray she's not really doing all she could be doing, except posing as Winter's sidekick.  This is disappointing, because Scarlet was such an awesome character in her own book only to be shoved to the side in the two volumes following it.

I have one other main complaint about this book, and that's its false climax.  Halfway through, there's a scene that really seems like it could end it all--except you know that it can't, because half the characters aren't there and there's still like 400 pages to go.  The "false climax" isn't in and of itself bad, because, hey, you've got 800 pages, and you've gotta keep the action going for all of them.  What is bad is that, after this big scene, it takes a long time for the action to get up and moving again.  It meant that, while I took the day off work to read this because I thought I was going to devour it like I did the first three, I didn't really need to; there are plenty of points like this, when the action just falls off and takes a long time to get going again, that would have made it very easy to put down this book and walk away.  I think this could have been fixed by some more alternating of the chapters, instead of having a big chunk of Cinder and then a big chunk of Winter at this point, which would have kept more suspense as we flipped from one character to another.

Finally, there was a plot thread that seemed like it was going to become prominent, but didn't.  It involved Adri giving up legal rights to Cinder, which made it seem like something all plot-y was going on, but...that never really came to fruition.  It just kind of dropped off.  That's a pretty minor thing in the grand web of plots that was going on, but it did stick out because everything else tied together pretty nicely.

Oh, and Luna really started to resemble Panem from The Hunger Games at some points, with a capital full of happy citizens who thrived off the labor of other, repressed sectors that all specialized on one specific type of industry.  Like, the rock miners (District 12) start the rebellion, and the lumber people (District...7?) join in, but the technology people stay mostly loyal to the Capital Artemisia.  I would have liked to see this avoided.

All of this complaining makes it seem like I didn't like the book.  I did.  I really did like it.  I thought it was a good, solid ending to the series, with enough rough and tumble-ness that it made it serious but without characters being killed off all willy-nilly, and with everything being tied up pretty nicely.  I don't think any huge loose ends were left hanging.  Meyer seems to have done a good job keeping track of all of them.  The writing was, as always, excellent, the characters were great.  I just feel like it got too big, and maybe some of the plots would have been better off if they'd wound up a tad earlier than they actually did.  Wolf and Scarlet, for example, got pushed aside because they were so very unnecessary for most of the book, and it might have made sense to just end their plotline a bit earlier.  Still, I did like this, and I can see myself reading it again in the future.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Cress - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #3)

Oh, I love this series.  But let me tell you, I wasn't planning on reading Cress just yet--'til I got the email.  It was Goodreads "New Releases by Authors You've Read" email for October, and when I went to the full page, there it was: Winter.  The final book in Meyer's series.  It was marked as being released on October 13th.  And I went in a frenzy.  I hadn't read Cress yet!  I hadn't read Fairest yet!  I had to read them!  So I scurried off and bought Cress, and absolutely devoured it.  Eager for what was next, I went to check out Winter...and found that it's real release date is not October 13th, but November 10th.  Goodreads had lied to me!  How dare it?  Well, it looks like the first two chapters of Winter will be available for preview on October 13th, and that's what the email referred to--which is a pretty big cop-out, if you're asking me.  Now I have to get Fairest and make its short length last an entire month until I can get my hands on Winter and this series' luscious conclusion.

Because that's just what Cress was, just like the Cinder and Scarlet, the first two books in the series: luscious.  The characters, the relationships, the stories, the futuristic setting...It's all just wonderful.  In Cress, Meyer brings in her third heroine of the series, Crescent Moon--the titular Cress.  Cress is our Rapunzel.  She has spent seven years trapped in a satellite orbiting Earth with only an array of computers to keep her company.  A Lunar shell--that is, a Lunar without the gift of glamour, for those of you who haven't been reading along (you should be)--she should have been killed as an infant, but was kept alive by one of Queen Levana's lackeys.  Cress' computer skills are top-notch, and she's been doing Mistress Sybil's bidding for years, hacking Earthen systems and hiding Lunar ships.  Until recently, when a change of heart--or perhaps a realization that what she was doing was wrong--resulted in her switching sides and helping the renegade Cinder and her allies.  All Cress wants in return is for them to rescue her from her satellite and take her to Earth.

Of course, things can't be easy.  The rescue attempt goes wrong.  Cress and Thorne (one of Cinder's allies) end up separated from the rest of the group, castaways in the Sahara desert.  Scarlet ends up a captive of the Lunars.  Wolf is nearly dead.  And Cinder has to figure out how to fix it all and stop Emperor Kaito's marriage to Levana, which would result in pretty much the end of the world.  It's a lot for a teenage girl, even a cyborg princess teenage girl, to handle.  But she does, with aplomb, and you can't help but root for her.  Meanwhile, everything else just gets...worse.  Darker.  Human (Lunar?) trafficking, slavery, torture, and plague all feature in this book, and while it's aimed at young adults, Meyer definitely doesn't pull punches in the telling.

Meyer did something different with Cress' character.  Cinder and Scarlet are both solitary, strong-willed young women who have definite strengths and skills and have been exercising them for a long time.  While they may end up in unfamiliar situations, they're still on their own world (for the most part) and know how to deal.  For Cress, that isn't the case.  An exile for most of her life, her only knowledge of Earth coming through the internet, she's naive and a little immature.  She gets through situations by pretending she's someone else.  She desperately wants a fairytale romance, in opposition to Scarlet and Cinder, who might have love interests but are more concerned with more pressing matters.  Cress isn't as strong as Scarlet and Cinder.  She can't fight.  She can hack a computer, but that doesn't do her much good when she doesn't have one.  She can't navigate, she can't fix things, she has no real knowledge of her new surroundings.  Consequently, she has a very different character growth trajectory than Meyer's other heroines.  Cress has to gain confidence in herself, which is something that Cinder and Scarlet didn't struggle with as much.  It was different, and I liked it.  While Cress is definitely naive, she's not so in a way that made me want to slap some sense into her.  Instead, I cheered for her, watching her grow and develop and come into her own.  Cress isn't going to be a butt-kicker, but she's definitely an asset to Cinder's team and I look forward to seeing more of her.

And Thorne.  God, I loved Thorne.  Maybe that's because, for most of the book, he's not a point-of-view character and you only see him through Cress' perspective, but I loved him nonetheless.  I think Meyer did a great job fleshing him out in this one, making him more than the wacky criminal we'd met previously in Scarlet.

Speaking of Scarlet...I would have loved to see more of her and wolf.  They're greatly lacking in this book, and while I can see why, I still wanted more of them.  Meyer had to separate Scarlet and Wolf for the plot to work and to keep the tension in their relationship.  They got very intense very fast in Scarlet, and I think it might have gotten boring if they had just figured everything out in this one--which they inevitably would have done if they hadn't been separated.  But these are fairytale adaptations, and happily ever after can't come until the very end, so I suppose I'll just have to deal with it.

And Winter!  We got our first glance at Princess Winter here!  So awesome!  I can't wait to see more of her.  How am I going to go an entire month Winter-less?  I don't know.

I only have one complaint about Cress and this series in general.  I love that Meyer adds a new fairytale and a new heroine in every book, but when they're all being added to each other, it means that each one ends up getting progressively less page time.  It means the story has to jump around more in order to cover everyone.  By this point, there is a lot of stuff going on, and while it doesn't get convoluted or hard to follow, none of the girls really got the coverage I would have liked.  This might be a good thing--I liked Cress, but it's possible that too much of her would have driven me away, and the reduction of Scarlet's role sets up for the next book.  But...still.  I felt just a tiny bit like I was getting gipped out of page time with my girls because the book, even at almost six hundred pages, just wasn't long enough to contain the awesomeness of them all.

Here's the thing.  I read many books I like.  I even read a good number of books I love.  But Meyer's Lunar Chronicles fall into a separate category all together: books I will read again and again and again.  They're very different, and they're just good.  I love them, so, so much.  I can't wait until Winter comes out, and then hopefully a box set, because I have the Kindle editions but would love to have these in the flesh (print?).

4.5 stars out of 5.