Review: Cinder

CINDER (Lunar Chronicles #1)
Marissa Meyer
Paranormal Young Adult
387 pages
Feiwel & Friends
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

MY THOUGHTS
A beautifully reimagined fairytale, Cinder proves to us how certain core fictional elements never fail to engross and enchant while also intriguing us with the intricacies of a completely new world ripe with new technologies and new problems. Much like she does with our cyborg protagonist, Ms. Meyer takes certain familiar aspects of the Cinderella tale and adds pieces and parts to it to create a fascinating hybrid, a blending of recognizable and foreign plot elements that keeps us glued to the pages despite our basic knowledge of how things will play out. There are so many additional layers to the rags-to-riches storyline of the original fairytale–the tension between Prince Kai and Cinder so much more palpable, the threat of discovery and the subsequent repercussions so much greater, and Cinder’s past so much darker and murkier—that our memories of everything we loved about the version that came before this are overshadowed by a potent desire to see where this new version will take us.

Though Cinder has had a rough past and exists as a servant in a home where she should be an equal, she never elicits a sympathetic response from us, instead earning our outright respect for the way she handles herself against those who seek to tear her down. She never whines over her predicament nor does she meekly accept her circumstances as law, always dealing with what fate hands her in a way that makes us sit up a little straighter and hold our chins up in her honor, infinitely proud and envious of her strength. The formation of a bond with Cinder is smooth and easy, our emotional attachment to her growing with each page even as the weight of all the secrets she’s keeping both from Prince Kai and her family sits heavier and heavier on our chests, dread for the moment when all her perceived undesirable differences are made public wrapping around our hearts with ice cold fingers as we find ourselves pulled fully into her story.

The relationship between Cinder and Kai is refreshingly sweet and slow-moving, sparks crackling back and forth between them on more than just a romantic level as secrets from Cinder’s previously muddled past are revealed, ratcheting up the forbidden nature of merely a royal/commoner pairing and turning it into something else—something darker and more intense—entirely. Though some of the discoveries regarding Cinder’s identity and her history before being adopted at age eleven are easily predictable, it doesn’t diminish our enjoyment in the least, instead our early deduction only gives us more time to think of what it means for her in general as well as for her and Kai specifically, thus adding a whole new level of tension that would have been noticeably absent had the big reveal toward the end been more startling.

Overall, Cinder is a strong start to the Lunar Chronicles series, Ms. Meyer creating a very memorable version of Cinderella with her own unique stamp evident on each and every page. The only minor nitpick would be it starts just a touch slow, the introduction of New Beijing, the plague crippling it, and Cinder’s relationship to her difficult family taking a while to unfold to the point where we can settle in, pull the parameters of this new world around us and let ourselves experience Cinder’s increasingly complicated life. The ending is neither cliffhanger nor neatly-wrapped package, instead leaving us with a lot to think about and anticipate without driving us to the brink of madness, and we close the back cover with a smile and a reminder to locate the release date of the next book at our earliest opportunity.

Rating: 4/5