Winter Review

This week's novel is Winter, the final installment of the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer.  I haven't talked about the rest of the series on here, so I'm going to talk about the series as a whole, but focus on Winter.

Each of the four books in this series is a retelling of a fairy tale, set in a sci-fi future.  Cinder is the story of a cyborg mechanic, who lives with her bigoted step family, and meets prince Kai when she fixed his Android.  Scarlet is the story of a pilot in a red hoodie, who goes to search for her missing grandmother and meets a genetically engineered soldier, who now has wolf DNA.  Cress is the story of a computer hacker, who is kept alone on a satellite, where she spies on the earth for Luna.  And Winter is the story of the Lunar princess who is so beautiful and the people so taken with her that the Lunar Queen sees her as a threat.

Through all of these individual stories about girls in the future is the added story of the Lunar Queen's invasion of earth, and her plans to marry Prince turned Emperor Kai and become Empress of the Eastern Commonwealth.  Furthermore, each novel is additive, with the new characters living out their fairy tale while joining up with the characters from the previous books, who are now off script.  This way, even though the beats of the main story are obvious, the rest is up for grabs.

At this point in the series, this is getting to be a lot of story to go around.  The book still gives time to Cinder, Kai, Scarlet, Wolf, Cress, Thorne, and the Lunar Queen, so Winter's story feels shuffled to the back instead of acting as the main driving force of the plot.  It feels like even Meyer acknowledges that we all know what's going to happen to Winter, so her story is just going through the motions.  "This is the part where Winter's guard is going to fake her death.  This is the part where she gets put in a stasis chamber."  It was well written, but I was much more invested in what everyone else was up to. 

Part of this is that I like Winter as a character less than I like Cinder and Scarlet.  I've had four books to get to know Cinder and three to get to know Scarlet, while Winter doesn't have time to grow on me.  Furthermore, Winter and Cress have more demure personalities, while Cinder and Scarlet are brash and assertive and I just find it more fun to read about them.

The thing Winter did have going for her as a character was that she had Lunar Sickness.  Lunars have a gift that allows them to make people see things and lets them control people, but if they don't use this gift, they start to hallucinate.  Winter has vowed to never manipulate anyone with her gift and that decision is rotting away her sanity.  Her dedication to treating people with respect makes the people of Luna like her, and her declining sanity makes the Lunar Queen underestimate her.  Some of her best moments were when she used the fact that everyone thinks she's crazy to act even more crazy than she actually is in order to aid the rebellion against the queen without anyone suspecting her.  There is also a great discussion about how she's not broken, this is just a part of her.

The Lunars are frightening in this.  They can control people, so they make several people chop off their own fingers or claw at their own faces.  They use guards as human shields, making them jump in front of bullets.  They can take control of half an invading army and make it attack the other half.  They can make you shoot someone you love or say things you don't mean.  They were scary, and I think the only thing not making them completely over powered was the fact that this is YA and it can't get too grizzly.

The romance in this series was good too.  The relationships grew organically, they made sense, they felt balanced and reciprocal, and they had believable arguments and setbacks.  The problem though was that by this book, everyone was paired off, and that's a lot of straight couples hanging out on a space ship.

The world building on earth isn't great.  There's some obvious missteps, like having Africa be one country and having Asia be one country with a Japanese Emperor.   Yikes!  The cultural influences are also shallow, where they're basically all culturally Western and wear kimonos to a ball (...I...oh dear).  But this book took place almost entirely on the moon, so its world building didn't stumble over real cultures or real history.

On the whole, a fun series even if I didn't care about the title character of this last book.

***

Next week: The Scorpion Rules, YA sci-fi by Erin Bow.