Review: Cinder

Cinder by Marissa Meyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cinder is a gifted mechanic, treated as a second class citizen because she is a cyborg. While her planet is being ravaged by a plague, her country has a cyborg draft that allows for cyborgs to be used as test subjects in a futile attempt to find a cure for the plague that has killed countless people. When her path crosses with that of Prince Kai, Cinder's life is turned upside down as she works to hide her life as a cyborg from him and is blamed for every thing that continues to go wrong in her stepmother's life. As the stakes get higher, Cinder finally begins to learn the truth about where she came from and what role she has to play in the fate of the kingdom.

I tried reading this. And then I tried again. Somehow, I just didn't take the time to really sit down and get farther than 50 pages into this book. When I started reading Scarlet however, things changed. I thought Cinder was interesting in that book and I realized that it would be better for me to read book 1 so I could really appreciate where Cinder came from and how she'd grown as a character.

I think for me, the issue I have is that I'm not a big fan of the story of Cinderella. It's just never really appealed to me as a story because of the horrible family life that Cinderella had with her stepmother and stepsisters and all of the abuse and the chores. I was really big with the whole "That's not fair!" thing as a kid and I've just never let that go when it comes to this story. As a result, I'm not quick to jump at the chance to read books influenced by it.

I did manage to get far enough in this book that the influence didn't matter as much. I was more interested in the fact that Cinder was a cyborg. I wanted to know what had happened to her, who made the decisions to save her life that way, why was she left with a family that hated her for being saved like that? I loved Iko, and Peony and I even started to think that Prince Kai was interesting enough when he struggled with his responsibilities trying to save his people from the plague and keeping a war from starting.

It's not the best book I've read by Marissa Meyer but it's better than the first few chapters suggest. Meyer was only getting started when it came to the twists she had in mind for this new world she'd created. It's worth reading Cinder just to see where everything started off and to appreciate how much everything has developed in the following books.


Rating: 7.5 Stars


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