Monday, 25 April 2016

BOOK REVIEW | Winter by Marissa Meyer

Genre: Young Adult
 
My Rating: ★★★★★
 
Goodreads Summary:
Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend—the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters?

**Spoiler Free Review**

This book was simply brilliant. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this book, Winter is the further and final book in the Lunar Chronicles series; the first being Cinder. This set of books are retellings of different fairy tales but with a sci-fi twist to them.
 
I won't say much about the plot because I don't want to spoil anyone, but I will say that one of my favourite things about this book was definitely the characters development and interactions. In Cress I found Cress to be rather predictable and boring, but in this book she developed exponentially, and I loved her. Thorne also quickly became one of favourite characters and I couldn't have been rooting for these characters more. I enjoyed the previous books but this tied them all up so beautifully that it made me love them all so much more.

The entire series is spectacular and the fairytale elements were incredibly interwoven in with the story. The friendships between the male characters and female characters was just lovely; I love that there was no angst and that the female characters could actually be friends without all the jealousy and pettiness that is so often seen in YA literature. Not only this, but all eight main characters are so unbelievably unique. It's hard to write characters so that they don't blend into one another but Meyer does it seamlessly. The book also has a very realistic villain and the exploration Luna made the story so much better.
 
I could gush more about this book but I think that's probably enough for now! If you think you might be interested then definitely pick up Cinder and give it read; the series gets so much better as it goes on.