There is a reason I haven’t blogged in a week. It’s not that I haven’t been reading, or haven’t finished a book…it’s that I’ve been too absorbed in this series to pause long enough to blog about it. (I’m already well into the third book by now…but I digress.)
Fans of Cinder will certainly delight in this much-loved sequel. Readers still follow the cyborg, post-ball, post-fairy tale, but are also introduced to the non-robotic happenings of Scarlet (Scarlet is a shade of red – which fairy tale has the word “red” in it???), who is on the hunt throughout France to find her missing grandmother. The simultaneous story lines very much work for this series. Scarlet has her own plot unfolding, with a base of a well-known fairy tale guiding the plot; but, sporadically dispersed into this is the no-longer-fairy-tale plot of Cinder (and sometimes the prince) on the run from the law. I never once found myself more invested in one plot over the other, as so often many multi-character plots go.
On the way, Scarlet receives help from a mysterious gent named Wolf – not that she really needs it; Scarlet is one tough cookie. She’s got all the characteristics of a true heroine (fight, determination, selfless sacrifice, and piloting skills) along with the believable fallibility: she loves flirting and attention, just like her father did, and sometimes she doesn’t care about the consequences of this on others.
*Spoiler alert* : Perhaps my favorite part of the series as a whole (at least at this point, two books in) is the conclusion of the love story of Scarlet. At the end of Cinder, there is no happily ever after, at least not yet; Cinder is put in prison and believes Kai wants nothing to do with her anymore. But at Scarlet‘s end, it looks like, after a tumultuous ride, that she is all but dating her love interest (despite a few qualms, of course, to be presented in the third book). The contrast is a pleasant one; so often authors narrate all their love stories is the same manner, and I was very much expecting Scarlet to end up alone at the end of her book, and maybe in even in jail à la Cinder. (Of course, I would have expected her to end with her dream guy at the series’ conclusion, but that’s another matter.) Meyer reminds us that not all characters are a blueprint, that not all characters share the same story arc.
Spoiler alert concluded, if you haven’t indulged your childhood-fairy-tales-enjoyment-meets-young-adult-bliss, you should jump right into The Lunar Chronicles. If I haven’t made this clear already, you’ll be pretty glad you did.
Much Ado About YA 