The Lunar Chronicles series is like a snowball rolling down a hill. We start off with the singular story of Cinder, a plucky cyborg mechanic. Cinder discovers she might be something more and soon a viscous plague, the future of the empire and the fate of a moon kingdom might be in her hands
As we roll down the hill with each book in the series we pick up new characters and story lines that are all incorporating and mixing together to form the giant snow ball finale that is Winter, which comes in at 900 pages or 23 hours of audio.
While the sweet and quirky Princess Winter is our titular character this book brings the entire gang together (Cinder, Thorne, Iko, Cress, Scarlet, Wolf and Kai) for one last mission to overthrow Queen Levana. Meyers just knows how to juggle a cast of characters. But she probably didn’t need to do it in so many pages. There were a lot of section I felt weren’t necessary.
At some point I forgot this series was based on fairytales because of how original Meyer’s world building is. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of the original tales and it really shows how a good adaptation can work, especially with Winter’s story. Can I just say Winter has the designation of being the character most Disney Princess-like ? Right down to the loving animals and breaking out into song.
My final note on this series is that I really zeroed in on how Meyer’s played with inverting the damsel in distress role. I mean Kai really takes on a lot of roles generally assumed by female characters.
As always Rebecca Soler did an amazing job on the audio and if you grab the audiobook there is an interview with Soler and Meyer at the end.
1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.