Book: Winter by Marissa Meyers
Series: Lunar Chronicles
Medium: Audiobook
Read From: Jan 05-08, 2019
Overall Rating: 3.5 wolf cubs out of 5
I had started the Lunar Chronical before Christmas break and finished the last in the original series (there is a prequel called Heartless I have yet to read) on the recommendation from my husband who listened to the audiobooks (which surprised because there are some pretty hilarious lovey-dovey romance bits that apparently jive with him. We’ve been together for over a decade and I was having a more you know moment about his taste in books as I read this book, it was good times). The series is a fun and inventive YA that blends a future world with bits of sci-fi, fantasy, and, of course, its fairy tale source material. From Cinderella to Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White the series leans on the original fairy tales just enough to add in a spice of familiar to the otherwise inventive world that author has created.
What’s the plot about? Well, evil megalomaniac queen of the moon wants to TAKE OVER THE WORLD *evil laugh* and a ragtag group of an unlikely friend tries to stop her. I really boiled it down there, but that is the sum of it.
As the fourth and final book in the series, Winter is the culmination of all the events of the past three books and the send-off for the series, For the most part, it lives up to the promise and provides a fairly satisfying end to all the plots and subplots that the author had going throughout the series. I did find the ending to wrap up a little too nicely and fairly fast. The end fight between our heroine and the evil Queen wraps up with the uncertainty of who was mortally injured and the heroine passing out then waking up with everything nicely wrapped up. That sat less well with me, as I felt that more could have been done to wrap it up without having to do the “what happened??” and the recap style end to the story.
Even though I am a great lover of love and romance and YA in general, I did find the romance plots a little distracting in the whole series. At times there was some really serious stuff happening and the POV character would be all ” I can’t help but admire how hot this person is in this moment” like dudes, keep it in your pants till the war is over, there are more pressing things going down right now.
Most surprisingly for me, was how invested I got with the story of Winter (aka Snow White) who was only introduced officially in the 4th book. I will give props to the author for creating really interesting side characters throughout the series, some could even argue that they were more interesting than the official main character and main plot line. Those ‘some’ are me, I would argue that. My favourite storylines were that of Winter/Jason and Cress/Thorne.
Overall, I don’t think the author needed to do the fairy tale tropes at all, because she really did invent a neat and unique future world and a plot that didn’t need the recall back to the fairy tale origin stories to make it interesting. But it didn’t harm the story, so there you go.
As this was an audiobook, my review of the reader is that she was pretty good overall but for some reason did a really weird voice for Princess Winter. And of course, I found the one random french accent for Scarlet unnecessary. None of the other French people in France had them, just Scarlet. Other than that it was an excellent listen.
Anyways, fine fun times. Have at the series for enjoyable quadriology (that’s not a word, but I’m going with it).
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