Cress by Marissa Meyer

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
What this book is about (If you haven’t read Cinder or Scarlet by the same author be warned, spoilers ahead!):

Cinder, Thorne, Scarlet and Wolfe are hiding from Levana and her forces on the Rampion while trying to come up with a plan on how to bring Cinder to power and dethrone Levana. Somewhere in space, living in a satellite circling Earth for seven whole years lives Cress, the girl that has helped Cinder once in the past. When she manages to contact the Rampion, the gang of four runs to her rescue. But everything goes wrong and the group find itself scattered around the galaxy. All that, plus the fact that the royal wedding between Levana and Emperor Kai is taking place very, very soon.

Having read all three out of the four books in The Lunar Chronicles series I can say that my favourite so far has been the second on, the story of Scarlet. But let’s talk about Cress. Cress is a fairytale retelling of Rapunzel. Before going into Cress I only remembered that Rapunzel was locked in a tower and that she had very long hair. That’s pretty much all I remembered from the story so I was not sure what to expect for this book. The format is the same as with the previous books. Short chapters reading from multiple perspectives.

The net was littered with horrors. Victims dead in the streets with shredded and blood leaking into the gutters. Feral men-creatures with gore on their chins and beneath their fingernails and staining the fronts of their shirts.

So, as you would expect by now from Marissa Meyer, this is a quite amusing and funny book. My personal favourite character is Captain Thorne. He is witty and so full of himself that it ends up being ridiculously funny. Cress is a girl who has spent a great deal of her life in isolation, in a satelite. She is a quite naive, peculiar girl with fantasies that her one true love will come rescue her and they will be forever in love and happy. Had it not been for Thorne and his hillarious comments, Cress would have been a very boring chatacter. Thorne’s character brings their conversations to another level. He made me laugh, he was a great addition to the story. We also briefly meet Winter who is a character that might turn out to be the most interesting of all of them in the fourth book.

He was exactly the kind of hero Cress had been dreaming about her entire life.

The story takes a more complicated direction than the first book of Cinder. We have more characters who are somehow related with each other. We have Kai who is in huge trouble but seems to be understanding only half of what’s going on around him (great Emperor for the Eastern Commonwealth!) The story of Cress is way more connected to Cinder than Scarlet was. One of the strongest points for Marissa Meyer’s books was the humour and the funny dialogues between the characters. I feel like even though this was definitely present in Cress, there were not many amusing dialogues to follow and the story got a bit dull.

She dreamed of deep soul connections and passionate kisses and daring escapades. She was certain that he simply had to meet her, just once, and he would feel the same way. It would be like those epic love affairs that exploded into existence and burned white hot for all eternity. The type of love that time and distance and even death couldn’t separate.

Somewhere in the middle of the book I felt that the plot became too predictable and that I didn’t have to worry about the characters anymore because of course they would make it at the end. The action scenes didn’t help to compensate for this problem as they felt kind of slow. I was missing the excitement in this book that luckily came back, at least for me, at the end of the story. This is where things became more interesting again. But overall, we learn more about the Lunar powers and we also see them in action. Cinder is evolving as a character and taking more responsibilities.

“I have a price on my head large enough to buy the Province of Japan”

Many pieces of the puzzle come together, the puzzle itself expands and the story, as I said, takes a more complicated form which is good because Cinder was a way too simplistic storyline for me. But also many pieces of the puzzle show up missing and the great thing about this book was that it has a strong ending. Winter is a character that already sounds very, very interesting and she could be a strong addition to the series. Maybe even the most interesting character of them all. This is a very promising ending to a book. It made me want to pick up Winter right after so..good job Marissa Meyer!

No, she wanted to look irresistible, but there was no use dwelling on that. She had no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no properly fitting clothes, and only the most basic essentials for daily hygiene. She was as pale as the moon and her hair would dry frizzy no matter how she coddled it.

This is a 2.5 star book for me, it got kind of slow from early on and didn’t pick up its pace until the last 100 pages. But its extremely intriguing and promising ending make up for it. I also listened to the audiobook for Cress which I really enjoyed. I have liked the narration of Scarlet and in my opinion, hearing the back and forths between and among characters instead of reading it made the book even funnier and more interesting for me.I have to say also, that a lot of readers seem to have enjoyed Cress a lot so I am a minority here. One thing is for sure, I will be picking up Winter very soon!

Let me know if you read Cress and which is your favourite book from the Lunar Chronicles so far? Which characters are you most and least favourite?

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BookDepository: Cinder (Book 1)

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