The thing about sequels, or any book that comes after the first in a series, is that you’re never quite sure how they’re going to stack up to the first. Obviously, the first was good enough to get you to come back for more, but will it be as you remembered? Will the characters and story not only hold up, but progress? That’s the tricky part, I think. Sequels have to be better, have to push the story further along and really get you invested. […]
I’ve seen so many planets dancing
Poor Cress, man. In “The Lunar Chronicles,” Cress is our Rapunzel — locked away in a satellite orbiting Earth, performing high-tech intelligence operations under coercion by her Lunar mistress, who happens to be the chief aide to the evil Lunar Queen. So it could be said that Cress is the most important VIP whose political influence could never buy her own personal autonomy. Cress and our heroine of the long arc, Cinder, first crossed paths when Cinder intercepted classified data hidden by Cress in a […]
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. […]
Once you gone tech you ain’t never going back
Reading Cinder was a great way to get back on the YA train after my last misadventure. It’s actually well-written in addition to being well paced and having a heroine who doesn’t completely suck (the opposite, in fact — Cinder is a total badass.) The long and short of it is this: set in the future in “New Beijing”, the story is a retelling of Cinderella, except our title character is a cyborg. If that sounds awesome, it’s because it is, but the citizens of […]