Review: 'Cinder' by Marissa Meyer

Overview

Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Series: Lunar Chronicles
Pages:  387
Format: Paperback 
 

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless Lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . 

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.


Review (spoilers below)


I thought that this book was extremely poor. Whilst the writing style was average, it was nothing to write home about. The characters were extremely under-developed and were stereotypes of themselves. The story, was at some points a very accurate retelling, and at other points felt nothing like the original story. The story was extremely lacking, with very little tension in the story line, because frankly I cared about no one. All problems were resolved too quickly for them to add to the plot, and as such this story felt extremely rushed. The plot twist was also completely obvious to me, and I have no interest in reading the second book, especially as I know it's about another character, which means that Cinder's story line will not be resolved.

Now for the spoilers, and my real gripes about this book. Simply put it was incredibly boring. Whenever anything interesting was introduced it was immediately disregarded. A world that should have been extremely exciting was left under developed. I really wished we could learn more about the cyborgs, and the discrimination that they faced, but we didn't. We didn't even learn much about the robots. 

Cinder was an one-dimensional character. She had no personality, and she felt exactly like every other heroine from Y/A, which really bothered me, as I had hoped she would be a strong character. She had no memorable flaws (apart from being a cyborg). She was incredibly worried about discrimination due to being a cyborg but no one seemed to care, which bothered me, as this could have had great social commentary and it just lacked it. Her relationships were all jokes. Her step-mother wasn't as scary or horrid as she could have been, and would could have been a great subversion of the original story was abandoned for the sake of having yet another story with woman hating on woman. 

Her robot, who could have been a quirky and interesting character had no development, and read as though she'd been made up in about 5 minutes, so when she was killed I really couldn't care. I didn't really care when her sister died either, or when we saw that the little boy had been taken into hospital. In regards to the boy, she made an incredibly selfish decision to take the antidote and give it to him, when his mother had died, leaving him no one to look after him.

Her relationship with the prince was non-existent. He was used mostly so we could discover information about Levana, and there is some sort of insta-love between him and Cinder than completely confuses me since they only met about twice. It felt as though she'd tried to cram at 600 page book into 400 pages and subsequently everything was rushed.

Tell me if you think I should continue with this serious, or if it gets better, as right now I have no desire to continue.