So way back in June, when I was still struggling through criminal law and criminal procedure and constitutional law, I was also rereading The Lunar Chronicles. I talked about the first two books, Cinder and Scarlet, already. So today, I’m going to talk about the third book, Cress.
Apologies again for taking so long to get to writing this post, but Cress is probably my favorite book in the series, so I want to do it justice.
Since this is the third book in The Lunar Chronicles series, there will almost certainly be spoilers for Cinder and Scarlet. If you haven’t read the first two books in the series, you should go check out my review for Cinder here. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk.
Cress picks up where Scarlet left off. Cinder, Thorne, Scarlet, and Wolf are on the run aboard Thorne’s stolen rampion space ship. Emperor Kai has agreed to marry Queen Levana, so the attacks have stopped. Cinder has finally accepted her identity as Princess Selene, and she and her team are making a plan to fight back.
That plan starts with Cress.
Cress is a lunar shell—she has no lunar gift. Though Queen Levana has told her people that all shells are taken away and killed at birth, she really gives them to her head thaumaterge, Sybil, who has kept them in the lava tubes beneath the moon’s surface and regularly draws their blood for mysterious reasons. But even among shells, Cress is special. She is exceptionally gifted with computers, and so she has become the queen’s secret hacker. Sybil trapped Cress on a satellite orbiting Earth and forced her to spy on the Earthen leaders. It was Cress who warned Cinder about Levana’s plans for Kai before the Commonwealth ball.
At the start of the book, Cinder contacts Cress to get evidence about Levana’s plans for Kai and earth, hoping to reveal the plans and stop the wedding. When she learns that Cress has been trapped on the satellite by herself for nine years and that to give Cinder the evidence she needs would surely mean her death, Cinder and the others decide to come get her. But the rescue mission goes very, very wrong. I mean all the wrong it could possibly go.
I don’t want to say more than that, because I don’t want to spoil anything about this awesome book, but suffice it to say that the team is split up and they’re all fighting for their lives.
Each of these books is a retelling of a different fairytale. Cinder was Cinderella, Scarlet was Little Red Riding Hood, and Cress is Rapunzel. Rapunzel is one of my favorite fairy tales (thank you Tangled), and this is such a great retelling. Again, I loved how Marissa Meyer is so creative about interweaving the elements of the original Rapunzel story into her retelling. And then there’s just everything else I loved.
Let’s start with Cress, because she is the star of this book. She definitely isn’t as strong as Cinder and Scarlet at the start of this book. She’s really scared and anxious, but she’s also really smart and resourceful and curious. She’s also super bad at interacting with other people and it’s horrifying but kind of adorable. But as she and Thorne try to get back to the rest of the crew and then as the crew carries out their plans, she becomes so much stronger and braver, and it’s great to watch that journey.
I also love Thorne so much in this book. He’s kind of annoying in Scarlet, but when he ends up in a position of having to help and protect Cress, he just becomes really great. It helps that in the botched rescue attempt, Thorne hits his head and loses his vision. So he’s navigating all this, being the one in charge, while blind. And also figuring out how to be blind. And it is great. There is just so much awesome character development.
Scarlet continues to be totally amazing, and I continue to love her and Wolf’s relationship.
And as I said before, Cinder is finally growing into her identity and her powers and making plans to fight back instead of running. Sure some of her initial plans aren’t that great but we’re finally seeing the fruits of all her character development.
As with all the other books in this series, Cress is really fun and exciting and fast paced. I sped through it way too fast, given that I was supposed to be studying con law. I felt guilty about it at the time. I don’t feel guilty about it now.
And Cress also has some of the best blind person representation I’ve seen in a while in a sci fi or fantasy book. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but in case I haven’t, you hardly ever see people with disabilities in sci fi or fantasy, and if you do, there’s usually some super cool technology or else magic that basically negates the disability. When it comes to disability representation, I love two things about the world of The Lunar Chronicles, and Cress in particular. First, while cyborg technology does take away the physical drawbacks of a disability, the stigma and the classism surrounding it remain. It’s taken on a new form, perhaps, but people with physical disabilities are othered just as much in Marissa Meyer’s books as they can be in our world, and as a reader with a disability, that means a lot to me. It doesn’t feel like she’s just totally eliminating disabilities in her world. And even with cyborg technology, you get situations, like what happens to Thorne, where people become disabled and can’t get medical help right away. So even with the advanced technology, disabilities aren’t eliminated. Second, Thorne is great blind! His struggle to figure it out on his own, his crisis of confidence, even the way he searched for things on the ground or walked with Cress felt really authentic. It felt like Marissa Meyer did her research and put a lot of thought into how Thorne would act. Thorne cracks some great blind jokes, and he one hundred percent remains a valuable member of the team. Just wait until the climax.
I know in most of my book reviews, I usually have one or two things about a book that didn’t work for me. But I can’t think of anything critical to say about this book. It’s right up there with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on my list of books I reach for when I’m looking for a perfect example of how to handle something in my own writing. It was also definitely a big inspiration for my story “Polaris in the Dark” in this anthology and the middle grade space adventure novel I’m writing now. I’m sure Cress isn’t a perfect book, but I feel like I would have to dig far to find something wrong with it, and honestly I don’t want to do that.
If you’ve read The Lunar Chronicles, what did you think of Cress? Do you agree with my assessments? Did I miss something important I should have talked about?
I’m looking forward to chatting about this book with you all, and I’ll be back soon to talk about more books.