We took you out from your mother’s womb; Our temple, your tomb

This book is a sequel, and this review may contain spoilers for the first book in the series, Cinder.

I was initially surprised to see the direction Meyer chose to go when continuing her series, The Lunar Chronicles, in that she introduced a new protagonist and switched between character POVs, rather than just sticking with Cinder’s. A lot of time, this is a YA contrivance that bothers me somewhat, because it’s frequently a shortcut into another character’s emotions without having to write them descriptively (e.g. “I was sad” vs something that indicates to the reader that the character is sad.) Here, it works: it’s partly Meyer’s own writing skill that she’s able to differentiate the inner voices of her characters so well from each other, and it also allows her to continue the fairytale adaptation concept by basing each new protagonist on a different original story.

Scarlet is Little Red Riding Hood, with her flaming red hair and, yes, a red hoodie. Her grandmother (unbeknownst to Scarlet, a VIP when it comes to a missing princess who the evil queen in Cinder would really like to find) has recently gone missing, and on a quest to find her, Scarlet teams up with a handsome boy named Wolf. Cute, right?

I liked structuring the sequel this way. You get a new angle of the story that eventually converges with the larger narrative arc established in the first book and, in doing so, creates a group of allies to root for. I want to give a special shout-out to the comic relief in this story, who is an android friend of Cinder’s named Iko. In the first book, Iko inhabits a relatively non-humanoid body but has an extremely advanced personality and AI. She feels human and longs for a human body. Due to a series of mishaps, Iko’s “personality chip” has to be incorporated into the body of a spaceship so that she can be its primary AI. Iko on her own is goofy enough, but her dismay at regressing into something even less human than before results in some truly precious interactions between the ship and its occupants.

Overall, I read this just as quickly as the first book in the series and am really impressed with all of the balls Meyer has in the air in terms of characters, interweaving plot threads, and the world as a whole, including people who live on the moon being a credible threat. The sci-fi is sometimes overly fantastical, but not enough to take me out of the story. As of the time of this review, I’ve already read Cress, the next book, and it continues to live up to the potential of the first two. I hope the level of quality remains to the very end!