Cinder : Marissa Meyer

Cinder
Book One of the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

A big trend in the literacy world lately has been fractured fairy tales. We all grew up listening to and reading stories about princess and princes and dragons and witches and those stories continue on today. What is so great about the trend of fractured fairy tales is the huge creativity and liberties you can take with it. I bet you would never have imagined the white washed Cinderella as an Asian cyborg girl from the future with a mechanical leg.

Cinder is NOT X-Tina (sadly)

Lihn Cinder is a cyborg, meaning, half of her body is mechanical. She lives in the futuristic city of New Bei-jing, capital of the Eastern Commonwealth of Earth after World War Four. The Commonwealth is being ravaged by deadly plague outbreaks that no one has survived. Not only is the Commonwealth slowly dying because of illness, but the threat of the beautiful and powerful Lunars (humans who live on the moon who have special power to manipulate people with their beauty) hover over the city. Cinder owns a small booth in the market place where she does mechanical repairs and her whole life turns upside the day that the charming (and handsome!) Prince Kai comes to get his android fixed. She befriends him and (of course) falls in love with him and things go awry when he asks her to go to the ball.

Cinder is a smart retelling of a classic fairy tale. Rather than a glass slipper, it's a poorly fitted mechanical foot. Instead of a pumpkin turned chariot, we have a beat and rusting old orange car. Cinder is strong and smart; refreshing from the bland Cinderella who only swept floors and sung songs. This book has so many interesting things going on. Biological warfare. Abusive step mother. Evil Lunar queen. Deadly plague. Cyborg-Android human worth status. Political Intrigue. It's a lot. The only problem I had with this story is that I wanted more! I want a 'Visitors Guide to New Bei-jing' to have along side me while reading this. Chinese culture is so huge and the story only briefly touches on the complexity of the culture. Where is the class system, the heavy emphasis on family honor and respect, the debate of socialism versus capitalism!? People gush over this book and frankly, over praise it. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed it! I just don't think that it gave enough. It was like exploring the first four feet of the Marianas Trench.

Just keep swimming!

What I really liked about this book is the author, Marissa Meyer. Her author bio is typical of any young adult novel, except when she mentions she got her love of writing through Sailor Moon fanfiction! I almost fell out of my chair when reading that. We are all secretly (or not so secretly) nerdy and tend to hide our embarrassing likes (yeah, I've watched a lot of Anime...so what). I absolutely love that this author got her start on fanfiction.net by writing romantic Sailor Moon fanfiction. It gives a lot of hope to the millions of young authors chugging through their own creativity and ideas.  You've got to respect a published author who puts a picture of herself as Princess Zelda on her professional website.

In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!

Cinder is just the start of a several book series. The second book, Scarlet, came out in January and frankly, I loved it a lot more than this one. I bet you can guess what fairy tale it plays on! There are going to be four books total. Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter when put together may just give me the depth that I so desperately want from these books.