Review - Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Title: Cinder

Series: The Lunar Chronicles #1

Author: Marissa Meyer

Published: January, 2012

Pages: 387

Goodreads Rating: 4.09 Stars

My Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

My Content Rating: YA (Nothing more than kissing, Some mild violence)

Summary 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.

Cinder is an incredibly unique re-telling of Cinderella.  Set in a futuristic world that has been ravaged by a plague, Cinder is just trying to survive. When she meets Prince Kai, she knows that nothing can come of her attraction to him - after all, she's an android, barely tolerated by the world. But, she finds herself entangled in Prince Kai's ongoing struggle for power with the cold and calculating Queen Levania, and Cinder discovers that she can't hide from him anymore.

The negatives:

• Villain isn't well-defined.  Queen Levania (the evil Lunar queen) isn't all that well-defined in this book.  We get glimpses of her, but we don't know anything about what motivates her (besides power), and she's relatively two-dimensional.  However, since this is a series, I'm hoping that we will get to see lots more of Queen Levania in future books and learn more about her.  Because of this, I would say that this is a minor negative.
• Predictable twist.  I think just about anyone could have told you pretty early on what we were going to find out in the "twist."  It was pretty much blatantly spelled out for you.  Still, I enjoyed the characters' discovery of the truth, so I was okay with it.

What I loved:

• The story.  I LOVED Meyer's take on the Cinderella fairy tale.  It is hard to imagine a Cinderella story involving androids and plagues, but Meyer makes it work.  She takes elements of the original fairy tale and weaves them into a fascinating and wholly original new story.  If you're at all a fan of re-tellings and you haven't read this one yet, you should definitely pick it up!
• Cinder and Prince Kai.  I really connected to Cinder and her story.  I sympathized with her in her loneliness and her feelings of "otherness" since she was an android, and I could definitely understand why she felt that her attraction to Prince Kai was hopeless.  I felt her suffering when things went seriously wrong (which they definitely did) and couldn't help but hope for that fairy tale ending from the original story for her.  But, Cinder didn't sit around and feel sorry for herself - no, she was strong, smart and witty. Certainly not a boring Cinderella! Then there was Prince Kai. He was a fitting prince, struggling between his duty to his kingdom and his own happiness.  He tried so hard to do what was right, but there were never any clear answers for him, which I actually appreciated.  I was never quite sure what Prince Kai was going to do or how their story was going to end up!

I can't wait to read Scarlet and find out what happens next in this series. I give Cinder 4.5/5 stars.