I’ve continued my bar prep rereadathon by diving back into The Lunar Cronicles series by Marissa Meyer. I’ve raved about these books before, and I was so glad that I loved rereading them just as much now as I did when I first picked them up in 2015 (I think that was when I first read them). Today, I’m going to talk about the first book, Cinder, and I’ll go on to the other books in the next few days.
The Lunar Chronicles is a series of retold fairy tales in a sci fi universe. For those who don’t know, I love retold fairy tales to pieces. The Lunar Chronicles was also some of the first sci fi I ever read. I never really gravitated toward it as a genre before, but once I got into it I was just in love. Each book in the series focuses on a different fairy tale. Cinder, the first book, is Cinderella. Except Cinderella is a cyborg, there’s a deadly plague sweeping the globe, a threatened war with Luna (the moon), and so much more. Yes, there’s a ball and sort of a fairy godmother. We even get a pumpkin colored car to take Cinder to the ball, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cinder takes place in a future where the countries of the world have united into about seven countries (roughly by continent but Britain is still its own thing). People are also living on the moon, and they have developed from an Earthen colony into something not quite human. They can basically do mind control to mess with people’s emotions and perceptions and even force them to act without their volition. And like I said, there’s a deadly plague sweeping the globe.
Sixteen-year-old Cinder is the best mechanic in New Beijing, but she’s also a cyborg. Cyborgs are generally looked down on by most citizens and actually discriminated against by the government. Cinder is legally the property of her stepmother (her parents were killed in the same accident which prompted Cinder’s cyborg operation when she was eleven). Cyborgs are also drafted every day to be test subjects for plague research, which basically means they’re killed because they’re injected with the plague and then given antidotes to test. In general, people don’t think cyborgs are fully human. So Cinder tries to keep the fact that she’s a cyborg a secret as much as possible. When Prince Kai comes to her booth in the market to have a royal android repaired, she’s not about to tell him. Then things really heat up when Cinder’s younger stepsister, the one she likes, catches the plague and is sent off to the city quarantines and Cinder’s stepmother volunteers Cinder for plague research. Where she finds out that she is lunar and so immune to the plague, Prince Kai wants her to come to the annual peace festival ball with him, and oh yeah, the evil brainwashing lunar queen, Levana, is coming to earth to form an alliance which may or may not involve a marriage with the prince. And Queen Levana does not take kindly to illegal emigration from Luna.
Even after multiple rereads of this series, I still love this book to pieces. It’s fast paced and easy to read. Cinder is smart and resourceful, but also vulnerable in all the right places, and so she’s really likeable. We have both the personal stakes—Cinder wants to save her sister and run away from her stepmother, Cinder has a crush on the prince, and Cinder wants to not be caught by Queen Levana. And we also have these big intergalactic stakes with the plague ravaging the world and the possible alliance with Luna and all that promises and threatens. I feel really immersed in this futuristic world where people travel everywhere by maglev cars and androids and cyborgs and space travel are common. I also love all the little details that connect back to the Cinderella story.
I’ve heard and read criticism that for a book being set in a city called New Beijing, there isn’t enough Asian culture present and none of the characters really look Asian. I’m not going to comment on whether the characters look Asian or not. I have no idea what that even means, and I generally don’t mind if character description in a book is minimal. But as to the Asian culture, I’m torn. I think it’s a valid point, but I also think we’re hundreds of years into the future, countries have collapsed and reformed, and on the whole the world has become smaller. This doesn’t mean that different cultures will have been eliminated, but I feel like it’s fair that cultures we know today would change. So for me, I treated the culture of the Eastern Commonwealth in this book as having roots in today’s Asian culture but having changed into something new and we’re discovering that in the book. But again, I recognize that this could come off as tokenism. Representation in literature is a big deal, especially for books for kids and young adults. And it’s a big deal for a good reason. Having a culture that is nominally Asian and then it’s not really Asian can feel like false representation. I don’t know a lot about Asian culture beyond what I’ve read in books and seen in movies, so I’m not going to speak directly to what’s there and what’s missing in Cinder. I guess just know that this is a potential problem with the book.
Speaking of representation, I love the disability representation in this book. This will come up a lot more when we get to Cress, so stay tuned for my rant about one of the best blind characters I’ve ever read, but to give you a preview of my feelings: I really love how Marissa Meyer has created a world in which physical disability essentially doesn’t exist anymore, but the stigma still exists. It just feels real to me.
On the whole, I still love this book so much. I love Cinder’s journey and character development as she finds out who she is and what she’ll do to protect her friends. Yes, the revelation in the end is a bit obvious once you get there, but it’s really more about Cinder’s journey. And like I said I really liked the twists on the fairy tale. It presented Cinderella in a really new and fresh way.
I could keep ranting about how much I love this book, but I also have to get back to studying because that never ends, so I’ll leave you with this. Rereading Cinder, this might be the third or fourth time, was a wonderful experience. It’s a great start to one of my all time favorite series. If you haven’t read it, I hope I’ve convinced you of how awesome this book is. If you have read it, I’d love to talk about it with you. And I’ll be back soon to talk about the second book in the series, Scarlet, which is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.