loranhale:
the lunar chronicles + name meanings
“Even in the...
the lunar chronicles + name meanings
“Even in the Future the Story Begins with Once Upon a Time.”
()(insp)
Let’s have a quick recap, shall we?
In Cinder, I found an incredibly fun book to read about a cyborg living in the futuristic city of New Beijing, sometime after the fourth world war. It’s also the story of Cinderella, just not how you remember it.
Scarlet introduced a new character and a new fairy tale. Cinder’s story lines were woven in (which was a good thing, cause the previous book ended on a cliffhanger!) but for the most part this was Scarlet and Wolf’s story, set in Paris, and deepening the oncoming war between the Lunar Queen Levana, and Earth. This is also the story of Little Red Riding Hood, just not how you remember it.
Cress was a young woman who was kept away from any contact from either Earth or Lunar, captive in a satellite by the thermaturge Sybil. After she gets free, she and her very not!Prince Charming, here named Captain Thorne, go on an expedition through the desert, blinding him and endangering them both. This is also the story of Rapunzel, just not how you remember it.
I often get annoyed by the little tag lines that novels have on them. They don’t seem to describe anything of the book within the covers and I find myself wondering if it was even read before the marketing department got their hands onto them. Not so here. This is not the fairy tale you remember, but it’s one you won’t forget, the back cover tells me, and it’s completely right. On all four counts.
Winter opens with a hallucination of the main character who won’t use her Lunar mind control powers at great sacrifice to herself. That’s right. Not only is this main character a person of colour, but there’s also a metaphor of mental health in the opening pages.
Very quickly, the book goes around to touch on the stories of all the characters who have come before, most of whom are on Captain Thorne’s stolen space ship, the Rampion, and he is only just getting his eyesight back. This book picks up directly where the last one left off, and it’s clear that Marissa Meyer has written notes on the back of her eyelids, or something, because not a single detail or hanging comment from any of the previous books is missed or neglected to be woven in as the story progresses.
I couldn’t believe my luck when I first saw how thick this final book of the series would be, but it’s soon clear that this is not going to be an easy ride for our heroes. Levana is in power, and she’s very good at making that power damn near absolute. For the first several hundred pages, this story becomes the story of everything that can go wrong will go wrong. When asked whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, I answered it was a fantastic thing, and here’s why: The battle and inevitable win against Levana is hard won but, ultimately, it’s the ending you expect. However, she’s been built up as this incredibly powerful figure through the whole series and if it had been any easier to defeat her, that would have been a disappointment or a sign of weakness in the writing. Even the final stand off between Levana and Cinder is drawn out to exactly the length it ought to be, with two near evenly matched enemies fighting hard until one finally overcomes the other.
The only thing I was a little saddened by was that we didn’t get an explicitly happy ending between Winter and her royal guard Jacin. At the same time, though, I loved that Marissa left bits and pieces to the reader’s imagination at the end of this tomb, rather than spelling everything out or having multiple endings on top of each other.
That doesn’t mean, however, that when I found out there’s a projection of a collection of Lunar Chronicles stories coming out in 2016, one of which being an epilogue for Winter, I didn’t start leaping in excitement.
