Marissa Meyer – Winter

1. Winter by Marissa Meyer (2015)
The Lunar Chronicles, Book 4

Read my review of book:
Prequel. Fairest
1. Cinder
2. Scarlet
3. Cress

Length: 832 pages
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction

Started: 03 January 2016
Finished: 08 January 2016

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? This series had me good and hooked.

We will be right back
just as soon as we start this
small war with the moon.

Summary: The princess Winter is known across Luna for being beautiful – maybe even more beautiful than her stepmother the Queen – but also a little crazy. Her oddness comes from her refusal to use her Lunar gift, a refusal which infuriates the Queen. Winter only truly feels safe with Jacin, one of her guards, and also her only friend, but she knows that Levanna would never allow it, and anyways, Jacin only sees her as a friend. But Winter will soon be put to the test, as Cinder and her friends are secretly on their way to Luna, under the guise of Prince Kai’s wedding delegation, hoping to rescue Scarlet and overthrow the Queen. But how much help can one broken princess truly be?

Review: While the previous three books in the series each focused on a different person, and intersected with the other’s storylines to a greater or lesser extent, Winter is much more of a culmination of all that has come before. To be sure, there is definitely still the fairy-tale retold element – Snow White, again, in a continuation of the themes of Fairest – but Winter does not play the central role in her book in quite the same way as Cinder or Scarlet or Cress did in theirs. This book is much more of a team game, with the various women (and their accompanying men) all working together to topple the Lunar government. This was probably my favorite part about it, that they were finally all working together, for more-or-less a common cause, and each person’s strengths were and integral part of the team’s success. I also liked that there were times where those same strengths were used by their enemy to turn them against each other – it made the tension a lot more real. However, even though I realize there were a lot of characters to follow and a lot of storylines to keep track of, I still thought this book was overlong. Trimming one or two of the times that their plans went wrong and they had to figure a way out would have tightened this book up quite a bit. It’s a fast read, and it’s fast moving, so it never felt like it was dragging, exactly, but I think the point could have been made equally well without one or two of the escapades. Still, on the whole, I quite enjoyed it, and thought it did a very nice job bringing the series to a close. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Definitely do not read this without having read the preceeding books (including Fairest). But the series as a whole is a great blend of young adult sci-fi, fairy tales, and some good love stories, with plenty of action and humor and just good fun.

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First Line: Winter’s toes had become ice cubes.

Vocab: (see the whole list)
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