Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Linh Cinder makes a living in New Beijing as a mechanic. More accurately, she makes money for her stepmother, a cruel and selfish woman who hates Cinder for being a cyborg. Cinder may not know how she came to be this way, part mechanical and only part human, but she knows there’s nothing she can do to change who she is. She’s mostly resigned herself to a life of being treated as a second class citizen when Prince Kai approaches her market stall and asks her to fix his android. What Cinder doesn’t know is that there’s more to Prince Kai and his android than meet the eye, and that by accepting this job, she’s going to become entangled in a high stakes game of disease, deceit, and diplomacy. In a world ravaged by a deadly plague and threatened by a malicious race of lunar people, who would ever think that one cyborg could be so important to the fate of the Earth? Cinder certainly didn’t, but now she’s about to find out.

Cinder was one of my favorite books read last year, and it will likely continue to be a favorite in the years to come. This is a book that I’ve been raving about for approximately half a year before its publication because I just couldn’t wait for others to see what I was so excited about. It boils down to this: Cinder is one spectacularly written, incredibly imaginative and romantic, futuristic fairytale retelling. Ordinarily, Cinderella as a cyborg is a concept that sounds a little odd to me, but debut author Meyer makes it work wonderfully. Her worldbuilding feels so effortless and integrated that everything from androids to an evolved race of people living on the moon to an unusually deadly plague feels completely natural within the story. This is a novel that readers will find easy to become invested in, because of the vivid characters, the futuristic setting, and the irresistibility of such a good story. I am so thrilled that Cinder marks the first installment in a new quartet, The Lunar Chronicles, and I desperately hope that Cinder makes a reappearance in later books because as much as I’d love to see where Meyer will take us next, I really don’t want Cinder’s story to be over.

Cinder will be enjoyed by all readers, especially those who also liked the A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy by Libba Bray, the Poison Study trilogy by Maria V. Snyder, and The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Rating: 5.0

Review copy from publisher Macmillan