Review: Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles) - Marissa Meyer

Cinder


The first book in the Lunar Chronicles series is “Cinder” and it is based on “Cinderella”. The book is set in the far future with space ships, mind controlling people living on the moon and cyborgs. Cinder is a cyborg, meaning that she is part human, part robot. When she was a kid, she was in an accident and to save her, scientists fitted her body with wiring and computer parts. 

Cyborgs are considered less than human, and as Cinder was orphaned in the accident, she now lives with a family, whose mother uses her as a servant. 

One day when Cinder is working in her booth at the market, she meets the crown prince, who is coming to her to get his android fixed. This meeting sets off the chain of events that make up the plot of the book. 

I won’t go into further details about the plot, as I don’t want to spoil anyone. I will say that I felt like it moved along quite slowly. I don’t know why, as there weren’t really any lulls, everything was pretty interesting as far as world building, backstory and characterization went. Maybe it was the fact that the book is set with a rather large type, so it felt like I had read so many pages, but nothing had really happened, because it actually wasn’t that many words on each page, if that makes sense?


As for the characters, I liked Cinder, even though I thought she was a little hard to grasp sometimes. She would be crushingly shy one moment and then so confident the next, sassing people out, but then becoming super shy again. It just felt a little weird, that she switched between behaviors like that. The crown prince Kai seemed a bit superficial. Meaning that I didn’t really feel like I got to know him. He is a crown prince, but he seems to be quite unconcerned with his responsibilities, in a way I feel isn’t quite realistic. Then there was also a bit of insta-love, especially on his side, which I can never seem to look past. There was a bit of it from Cinder as well, but I thought hers was somehow more understandable, as she would have been familiar with him at least from TV and such. 

I really liked Iko, Cinder’s “sidekick”. She was fun and sassy, and though she was a droid, I felt like she had one of the best personalities around. 

I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1000 Places to See Before You Die 20 - Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Image
You cannot go to Athens and not go to the Acropolis. It is a staple on any sightseeing tour and is likely to be crawling with tourists at any given point in time. Still, it is definitely worth it to brave the masses and see the fortified citadel above the city of Athens for yourself.   The word acropolis means the highest point of the city, and there are a number of these acropoleis scattered throughout Greece, but the one in Athens is so well known that it is simply called “The Acropolis”.  There is evidence that the area on the rocky outcropping overlooking the city was inhabited already in the 4th millennium BC, but it was Pericles who started construction on the many famous buildings in the 5th century BC. These famous buildings include the Parthenon, probably the most iconic of the buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings were all seriously damaged in 1687 AD when the Venetians had sieged the city and used th
Read more

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Image
This is the first book in a series, but I have no intention of continuing on with this series. The plot evolves around two young people, Amy and Elder. They live on a spaceship that has left Earth to find a new planet to populate. Amy was part of the cryogeniccaly frozen people on board, meant to be woken up upon arrival and using their skill set to populate the new planet. Elder, meanwhile, is part of the population that has been keeping the ship running whilst it travels towards its destination.  One day Amy is woken up from her frozen sleep and now she must learn to live on this spaceship, without her parents, slowly learning the culture and the secrets of this ship. It turns out there is an abundance of mysteries on board this ship, like who is waking up (and killing) the frozen people, who is the mysterious deceased Elder, what is the current Eldest up to and what’s with the “crazy” people and their medication.  Eventually all these mysteries are solved, but is
Read more

Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written.  The author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity Co
Read more