Books and Sensibility

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Marissa Meyer

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

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  • Release Date: 11/08/16
  • Audiobook Length :  14 Hours 34 Minutes
  • Genre: Fairytale
  • Publisher:Macmillan Audio / Feiwel & Friends

Katherine Pinkerton knows better than dream of owning her own bakery baker, she knows her destiny lies in becoming the queen of a wacky, quirky, surreal little Kingdom of Hearts. On the night she is to be betrothed she sets eyes on the handsome court joker, who has more than cards up his sleeves.

Unlike the Lunar Chronicles where the fairytale aspects are subtext and set in a modern world, Heartless is an overt-played-straight prequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Meyer digs into the Kingdom of Hearts and all its little oddities. It’s a place where animals talk, playing cards are courtier and if one bring something back from a dream. . . well then so be it. 

What we don’t really get to dig into in this novel is the plot. Plot points in the novel are hung like painting with no nails, there are a lot of them, you want to see them. . . but they have a tendency to fall off. One of the many plot in this book is about a forbidden romance that never really started for me. There is also a beta romance, a monster, intrigue,  war and magic. . . but we never get fully invested in any of it.

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Winter by Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles #4)

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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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Fairest ( Lunar Chronicles #3.5) by Marissa Meyer

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  • Release Date: January 27th 2015
  • Genre: Sci-Fi/Space Drama
  • Audiobook Hours: 6 hours and 36 minutes
  • Publisher: Macmillan Audio

I’ve never DNFed an audiobook, but let me tell you Fairest came *this close*. It wasn’t so much that the book was bad it just didn’t have the heart or fun I’ve come to expect in this series. The plot threads and world-building elements that hold the series together started to unravel for me.

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