Cinder: a brief [book club] review

taken from dclibrary.org

This book has been on my radar for a long time. It's one of those that I heard about when it first came out and thought sounded great, and then time passed and I forgot the actual details of the plot but had faith that my original interest was founded in something. You ever have that conversation with someone? "Oh I want to read this!" "Why? What's it about?" "I...don't remember. But I knew at one point and it sounded good then." The hubs and I have that conversation a lot I think...about books...about movies...and television shows that get added to Netflix...it's a problem. In any event, we chose this book for May's Book Club book, and I finally got to read it (and find out what the actual plot is).

Marissa Meyer's first novel in the Lunar Chronicles, Cinder, is a futuristic, intergalactic version of the classic Cinderella story. Cinder is a young girl working as a mechanic in the capitol city of New Beijing, working on androids and various other mechanical and robotic parts. She lives with her stepmother and two stepsisters who (with the exception of one stepsister) deeply resent her for the fact that her stepfather died of a tragic death shortly after adopting her into their family. Cinder's personal and social life are further complicated by the fact that she's a cyborg: a human with various replacement robotic parts due to a severe accident in her childhood. In addition to all this, there's a savage plague stealing the lives of countless citizens of Earth, leaving doctors and scientists scrambling for a cure. And in addition to that...the Lunar inhabitants of the moon, brandishing magical powers and a threatening intergalactic relationship policy, are pushing alliance through marriage with New Beijing's young emperor, but he's not so sure it's the best idea.

This is a very layered plot, with so much going on at times it was a little hard to keep up with what I was supposed to be concerned about at any given moment. For the most part, though, that wasn't my issue with the book at all. My biggest struggle was figuring out all the intricacies of the android/cyborg element. I don't typically read books like this, which means I don't really understand much about this whole world of fiction. I'm tempted to say that that almost shouldn't be a problem if the author does her job and explains fully what's going on (what the androids look like, what the androids' functions and purposes are, which of Cinder's body parts are actually robotic, what do those robot parts even look like) but I didn't feel like she did. If any of those questions were answered at all, they were usually much later and deeper into the book, frustrating me that she didn't help paint that picture sooner. She also kind of dropped the ball, I thought, with explaining the origin of the Lunar people. She mentioned that they were originally humans on Earth who relocated to the moon....but now have magical powers and aren't human? I'm sorry, you need to give more explanation than that. Was there space radiation that caused them to mutate? Was there something magical about the moon that gave them the powers? I don't know and I don't care, but you've got to do your job and explain. A couple people in Book Club who have read more of the books in the series said that that question gets answered in later books, but I reject that. If you're going to base that much of the plot and conflict on something, you've got to do the work and explain yourself to your readers right up front. But that's just me.

All of that being said, there were a lot of things I really liked about this book. I think the parts that drew me in the most and kept me really engaged were the links between this story and the original Cinderella story. Some of them more obvious (stepmother who doesn't like her, hardworking and low level job, studly prince who shows interest in her) but a lot are pretty subtle (the car she's fixing up to run away in is orange, like a pumpkin). It truly was a work of art, reworking such a well-known and overdone tale into a brand spanking new story (I mean, cyborgs? Come on.). I'll be honest, though, when I found out this was the first in a series of four books, I was kind of hoping this one would end in a way that wouldn't force me to keep reading. Womp womp. Ends with a cliffhanger and I'll have to officially add the rest of them to my list. Don't you hate that?