Thursday, July 23, 2015

Cinder by Marissa Meyer book review

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: 4/5



“Even in the Future the Story Begins with Once Upon a Time.”

I am so happy with this “Retellings” thing we have been seeing lately in books (and by lately I mean a while), I don’t know what it is that draws me to this kind of books so much but I just love seeing this classics being reinvented in new and exciting ways, and Cinder is one of them.

The story is about Cinder, a girl who, after an accident that killed her parents she had to undergone through a medical procedure that saved her life… but by making her a cyborg, people with robotic implants, just like her foot.

After her stepfather’s death, Cinder has had to live with her stepmother and stepsisters who treat her as if she were a monster due to her condition.

 Being discriminated for having robotic implants is something every cyborg faces not only in New Beijing, but also in the entire world. Cyborgs are, for some reason, considered as less than humans, charity cases at best, and as such they have less rights than humans do. Cinder works as a mechanic not only to make a living for herself, but also to maintain her stepmother and stepsister and their expensive way of living. 
She has no choice, her stepmother is her legal guardian and has every right over her to treat as she pleases.

People stay away from her, either afraid or disgusted and her only friends are Iko, a robot with a spunky personality and her stepsister Pearl, who loves dances and dresses but hates the way her mother and sister treat Cinder.

Her everyday life is normal, every now and then there is a case of letumosis, a new desease that is becoming pandemic, and cyborgs are “offering” themselves as test subjects to find a cure.

But one day, Prince Kai appears in her workshop waning to fix a robot that may or may not have a secret that could change the course of the nation, and when her stepsisters falls ill to the pandemy, Cinder is sent to be experimented on against her will.

No cyborg has ever survived the test, but just when she was giving herself for dead, something incredible happens, she survives and there she’ll learn that there is more to her past and scars that she knows of.

I really liked Cinder, the main character. It wasn’t fair the way she was being treated and yet she found a way to work around it. Moreover she had a sarcastic personality that I loved. Aaand did not fall head over hills for Kai, she was realistic about it and that gave her a lot of credit.

I loved loved loved loveeeed Iko, my sweet precious baby! So sassy and lovely!
I trembled everytime she was threatened to be dismantled.

In the end, I do believe that the story was incredibly predictable, but I enjoyed it inmensely nonetheless.

If I had to critizice something (and lets face it, that’s why I’m here for!) it would be the worldbuilding. Marissa Meyer had a wonderful chance to create an amazing world, this is new Beijing after all! We could have known what happened after the change, what things remained and what were new? What happened to the culture? Unfortunately, we get little information about this, about the technology and all.


It’s a shame, the book is great but still, a shame.

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