Wolves and Grandmothers

Scarlet - Marissa Meyer

While I felt like Cinder could almost have been a stand-alone, this clearly gears this up to what is going to have to be a completely mind-blowing climax. Cinder is gathering a "crew" at this point and it consists of some very interesting people. I kind of love them all, but overall I didn't like this book quite as much as Cinder.

 

Spoilers for this book will be limited to what you can guess from reading the back cover; spoilers for Cinder will abound. If you haven't read it, do!

 

I enjoyed the shifting viewpoints in the novel. It was an easy way to get to know the new characters without losing access to the older ones or to what was happening in areas where trusting the news being reported was questionable in this universe. Admittedly, I have always been a fan of multiple POV novels unless it is done very badly.

 

Cinder herself is wonderful, as always. I really like her. Watching her attempt to deal with the ramifications of her real identity and of what that means for herself and the world was difficult. Now that she is aware of her Lunar powers, should she use them? And when? And why?

 

Thorne is fabulous. I don't trust him to do right or to play a proper romantic lead for anyone yet, but he might be my favorite new character. He did a lovely job of comic relief when needed, but although occasionally over-the-top he was not one-dimensional. He made me smile when he was around, and I appreciated that.

 

I loved how gutsy Scarlet was. She did not take any shit and was comfortable toting a gun and handling herself in a world gone to hell. She is going to come in quite useful, I think.

 

Wolf was...interesting. I have a funny feeling he has a lot of appeal for a lot of people, but he is going to be one of those male leads I don't quite "get".

 

The romance between

Scarlet and Wolf

(show spoiler)

was a little problematic for me. I was torn between "Oh, they are so cute!" and "Oh, they...just met and are being really weird

with the whole wolf thing."

(show spoiler)

I'm not sure that I completely bought it, and I found the book's focus on it, while certainly not extreme, to be a bit too much for me. Do not get me wrong: this is not really a "romance" novel. But it felt like more of one than Cinder did. Admittedly, the woman involved is older than Cinder, too.

 

 

The eventual meet-up of the two primary points-of-view (not a spoiler--they totally said it in the synopsis) gave us the beginning of a group that is probably going to be instrumental in handling the threat of the Lunar Queen. This is the part where it started feeling Mass Effect-y for me. We have a horrible space-threat no one can quite sort out how to answer and many people do not even truly believe exists as a threat and a main character who ends up gathering a bunch of misfits together

on a talking spaceship: Hi EDI Iko! Welcome back!

(show spoiler)

to handle it.

 

 

Watching Kai deal with the political and personal fallout of the Cinder's denouement was rough. I like him because he does his best to behave as a proper ruler should. He understands that his first care is and should always be for the people that he rules, and he makes his decisions based on that principle.

 

Realizing in retrospect that

Little Red Riding Hood had been fooled by the "wolf" acting like her grandmother in the form of Ran's Lunar illusion

(show spoiler)

might have been my favorite "Oh wow, I know what story this is!" moment.

 

 

Things are gearing up quite well and I can't wait to see where they go from here. I am trying not to rush through the published books in the series because I will otherwise want need to re-read them before November's Winter comes out, but it is very difficult to restrain myself from picking up Cress right now.