We're an Open Book
Imma let you finish Twilight, but The Daughter of Smoke and Bone series is the best YA paranormal romance about a teenager and male-paranormal-who-is-super-old-but-looks-super-hot-and super young-so-we-swear-it’s-not-creepy of all time. Of all time.
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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.
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So, you know how people think most fantasy/dystopian YA is just a thinly veiled allegory for high school ? Well the Red Queen on it’s surface is pretty much that.
We’ve got Mare Barrow another brunette YA heroine who hates her hair and wishes she was more like her sister Gisa who is pretty, talented and basically put up on a pedestal.
In Mare’s world what separates the oppressed Reds from the elite Silvers. . . is their blood. The Silver’s blood silver blood gives them abilities like controlling elements, strength and mind control.
Mare soon discovers that even though she is Red, she has abilities like a Silver. A threat to the Silver way of life, The Silvers whisk her away to live among them until they can figure out what she is.
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The popularity of this book seemed to come out of nowhere. I just remember seeing it on an endcap one day in Barnes and Nobles and the next things I knew is was blowing up.
Ember in the Ashes takes place in The Empire, a vaguely middle ages fictional land with some vaguely Arabic influences. Elias (who by the way is 20 years old….which feels oddly old for YA) is a student at Blackcliff, a ruthless academy that trains Masks, the Empire’s deadliest soldiers. Laia is a Scholar, the conquered class, who goes undercover as a slave at Blackcliff for the Resistance to help her brother.
I don’t really have much to say about this book, which is weird since the audiobook is over 15 hours long. It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t click with me. I finished this book and I wasn’t amped for the next one. Thinking about the only other YA fantasies I’ve read; Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Young Elites, I think what this book is missing is characters with skin in the game. Elias and Laia are just kind of going with the flow all the time.
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I have been meaning to get to this book for years. YEARS. The Mortal Instrument series has the honor of being one of the first series we reviewed and looking back on some of the older reviews I feel like we didn’t give it a fair shake. I mean people love this series and The Powers That Be have so much faith in the story it’s getting a TV show after the movie bombed.With all that in mind I decided to go into this book with positive intentions. Did it work ? Ehhhhhhhh….nope.
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So…I finally listened to Fairest, the story of the Lunar Chronicles’ villain, Queen Levana. I expected some Once Upon A Time -never-love-anything-it-will-not-end-well level flashbacks and that’s basically what I got….