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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