Cinder by Marissa Meyer Book Review

 Summary:

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. 

My rating: Three and a half worms!

Cinder is a fantastic book, the author truly made a good choice by remastering the old Cinderella tale into this modern day series. This story has many good points, but it's without fault.

First, the awesomeness: 

POC main character.

No insta-love.

No abusive romance.

Message about acceptance.

Female friendship! (More to come in the series if what I learned is right.)

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it really is! But you could be wondering “Why three and a half stars instead of five, then?” Well, despite how much I liked this book it was hard to get into it, I found it boring at first and even annoying, and it’s all due to the lack of description.

 I know, I know, giving it a lower rating for that sounds dumb, but it was a big problem for me. The story is set in New Beijing, when a disease, Leutomosis, is decimating the world’s population. Countries have joined and formed confederations, usually ruled by a president, King/Queen or Emperor/Imperatriz. (Though I’m a little skeptical about being ruled by monarchy still in the future. Especially when confederations were created to set differences aside and work toward a common goal, substained peace.)

 Despite this gorgeous setting, we hardly see any of that world. Where is the culture? The people? Hell even the streets would have been nice. We get descriptions like “It was a cloudless night.” Or “Cinder pushed a box aside.” Everything described the immediate environment but what about the rest?! It was like imagining the characters moving in a white haze, with nothing around BECAUSE WE DON’T KNOW WHAT IS AROUND. It was so strange it made it hard to connect with the book, and this has never happened to me before. I have read books with little to no description and I still can picture the world and characters clearly, that doesn’t happen here.

Another thing were the characters, who also suffered from the description issue. They are good people, yes, but their voices felt too similar sometimes, and without being able to connect with them it was impossible to feel for them, at the beginning that was, then it got better and I got to enjoy their adventures.

The story is extremely predictable but I didn’t mind, it was fun and never stopped being entertaining.

I do have a problem though, there are robots and cyborgs. A robot is hardware and software, a cyborg is a person who has robotic implants like a prosthetic leg or hand. The thing was, that even though Cyborgs had been “people” so to speak, after they go through the operation they become less of a person, so much so that they have practically no legal rights. When they were making the tests to cure the plague cyborgs were given the honor to DIE to help the research, even if they didn’t want to they were forced to participate.

Why is that? I understand the message it was sending, and that discrimination is not really logical. Fear of the unknown is what drives senseless hate, but this was over the top and had no fit in the new world.

A good and fun read, absolutely recommendable.