Feiwel and Friends, 2013
*A HUGE thanks to MacMillian for sending me an ARC of this novel!*
In early 2012, I was lucky enough to win a copy of Marissa Meyer's debut novel Cinder, a sci-fi retelling of a fairy tale posing the situation of what if Cinderella were a cyborg. I read it, completely loved it, and have been insisting to everyone I know that this is a series that is not to be missed.
So when I was selected as a winner of an ARC of Scarlet, the next installment in The Lunar Chronicles, you can bet I knew how fortunate I was. There simply aren't words to express how much I have wanted to, needed to know what happened next. No second-book slump here for Meyer - people who loved Cinder will absolutely not be disappointed.
There's a whole new country and cast of characters joining those readers already met in book one. Scarlet lives in the European Union, not too far away from Paris, and her beloved grandmother is missing. But despite her best efforts, no one seems to care. No one, that is, except for Wolf, a street fighter who is as mysterious as he is lethal, and he may know who took the old woman. For some bizarre reason, it's believed Scarlet's grandmother could have information about the long-lost Lunar princess, but Scarlet knows Grandmere is just a farmer...right? Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, Cinder is trying to come to terms with the truth about her past, teams up with an American ex-soldier Captain Thorne to get out of New Beijing, and is determined to figure out a way to stop the evil Queen Leavana and keep Emperor Kai from making the worst mistake of his life.
Action, suspense, twists and turns with dashes of romance and tension here and there, this book has it all. Meyer has so masterfully merged these two story lines together in a way that it's still very easy to keep track of this large cast of characters and the plot. It will be interesting to see how this will hold up in the remaining two books of the series Cress (due out in 2014) and Winter (2015), but I have no doubt it will continue to be remarkable. It's agonizing to think that we'll have to wait so long to know how it ends, but I was lucky that my wait for this installment was two months shorter than a lot of others'.
As I've said on this blog before, sci-fi usually isn't my forte, but this series makes me reconsider that stance. This is sci-fi for the fantasy lover, with strong girls, charming princes, and a lot of action that makes it impossible to stop reading until you get to the final page. This is a five-star book in my mind, no doubt about it.
Comments welcome, and, as always, happy reading!
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