A teen cyborg is our only hope against the moon people

Cinder

Summary

Taken directly from the author's website:
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.

So yeah, we got a Cinderella cyborg, who is quite a flawed heroine, but I think it makes for a more relatable and human teen character.  She really just wants out of her messed up life but ends up being way more important to the situation of the moon people wanting to take over the Earth.  This book isn't going to be the next classic to be read in future AP English courses, but it's really fun and engaging and filled with interesting characters.

The Good

Okay, so there's a lot of things that, um, tickled my fancy.

As I'll explain below, the allusions to Cinderella are really neat, and I liked them and the changes the Marissa Meyer decided to make.

I also liked the pacing.  Meyer does a good job at that writing skill of showing and not telling, like how she doesn't even mention the word "cyborg" to describe Cinder til like page 8.  Until then, there's just a lot of description of what Cinder is doing that shows you she's a cyborg, which makes for a much more interesting read, like so:

One by one, she disconnected the wires that still linked her foot and ankle, each spurting a tiny spark. She couldn’t feel them through the gloves, but her retina display helpfully informed her with blinking red text that she was losing connection to the limb. With a yank of the last wire, her foot clattered to the concrete. The difference was instant. For once in her life, she felt… weightless.

Meyer, Marissa (2012-01-03). Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles Book 1) (p. 4). Feiwel & Friends. Kindle Edition. 

I really appreciated this particular excerpt because we already get some foreshadowing and reference to the glass slipper and how she's gonna lose it and how it symbolizes her escape from her slave-like position in her family.

But yeah, there's just the right amount of description so that I was never bored, she definitely doesn't drag on in other parts so that we can just get on with the story and find out what happens next.  That plot was moving!

Speaking of slaves, I liked the social commentary that can be interpreted from the cyborg situation in the story.  Cyborgs are treated as less than and are a minority.  Thus, they can be interpreted to be any unfairly treated minority, such as those with disabilities or prosthetics, race, trans people, etc.  However, this aspect isn't explored too deeply since the story is a focus on Cinder and why she's different and not on cyborgs as a whole.

The drama was good, especially all that ignorant and close-minded stuff Adri, the stepmother, would be spitting at Cinder.  I loved to hate her although I could kinda feel her on why she was so upset and messed up since you know...her husband was dead, and she blamed Cinder for everything bad that happened from that point.  Cinder was her scapegoat.

The other thing that was super interesting was the whole bit about the moon people.  Lunars are so interesting because of their advantages over regular humans, and their culture seems to have so much to explore.  I wanted to know more about them.  There were all these little bits about their dress and their customs and what all their stuff looked like, shiny and with runes everywhere.  I was like, yeah!  Give me more!

And then finally, I was digging all these female characters.  Cinder, Iko, Adri, Peony, Sybil, Queen Levana, Chang the bakery lady.  It was nice to see ladies of status.  Like, Levana is a queen.  Sybil is a boss-ass bitch who does her job.  Chang was the owner of a bakery.  Cinder was the best mechanic in all of New Beijing.  Iko was in charge of her own damn self like her personality and what she liked and had her opinions.  Adri was a single mother trying her best to get her daughters married and taken care of, which I get is like success apparently (which then begs the question of why these women are still looking to marriage as the ultimate success when it's freakin after World War IV???  Did women's rights die?  Or is this because Meyer is keeping in with the Cinderella tale?  I guess it's fine since we have evidence of women who aren't tied up in the marriage-is-the-ultimate goal.  And I know, I know.  Levana is trying to secure that marriage, but that's not her ultimate goal.  Her ultimate goal is WORLD DOMINATION!)

Lots of good in this book.

The Bad

Alright, as much as I liked this book though, it doesn't mean I didn't notice some of its flaws.

I didn't count all the references to Asian cultures, BUT I felt like there were way more Japanese references than anything else.  I understand that one culture might be more dominant considering this is New Beijing, but I felt like that even the Chinese references were not that great.  What I mean is exactly that.  They were references.  There was all this, like, name-dropping like cranes, sweet buns, kimono, cherry blossom tree, koi fish in the pond, pointed gold roofs, etc.  But it didn't feel like the culture was organic or woven well into the story.  At one point, Pearl made a comment about Cinder being jealous of her feet, but again, it was so vague and felt more like it was dropped in there as an afterthought to make it sound like Asian culture rather than feel like Asian culture.  I did like the Chinese name suffixes used, but because of the way it was written, it could also be like this sprinkling of Chinese culture or Japanese culture on top of the story.

Also, if this story's setting really is New Beijing of the Eastern Commonwealth, a combination of all the Asian countries and cultures, where were the Korean references?  The Thai references?  The Vietnamese references?  Any other culture besides Chinese or Japanese?  Maybe they were there, and I didn't notice them.  Or maybe they weren't, and the lack of Asian diversity could be attributed to the fact that it was the capital in former China or that so many cultures and peoples were decimated by the end of World War IV, but, really?  Really?  Are you gonna tell me that South Korea didn't make it?  That India didn't make it?  Really?  Where were all these other Asian cultures that could have contributed to an even richer culture, but then again, what even was the culture?

Try this.  If we removed all of these references, would it even change the story?  Would it change anything about the characters?  What if we replaced the Asian thing with any other culture or place?  It could be substituted with any other setting in the future.  I feel like the New Beijing setting had so much potential, but the setting was just that, the setting.  It wasn't alive.  It didn't have any depth.  It didn't permeate through everything in the story.  I felt this aspect was a bit weaksauce, if you ask me.  The cyborg situation and the Lunar people had way more substance and detail.

Lol, now after praising Meyer's writing, I'm gonna say that this book was pretty predictable and that it made Cinder a bit of a dumber character because she was just not keeping up with all the clues!  This isn't so terrible of a thing though.  I feel that this story and book still had a lot going for it despite that.  I mean, Cinder isn't playing the detective of a mystery novel now, so this "bad" is actually not too bad to me.

My last thing is that Kai so BLAND.  He's handsome and charming and flat.  Flat, flat, flat.  I get it though.  He's the generic prince.  More on that in a bit.

& The References

Okay, so as we get right away, this is a loose Cinderella re-telling or re-envisioning or re-interpretation or etc. etc. etc. (however you want to say it), and I really liked this concept.  It was super cute!  I also like it a lot because there is a Chinese Cinderella tale, and this story is set in China!  But, I did think more of the Disney version as I kept reading along.

So Cinder is obviously Cinderella, and she has the same family setup of evil stepmother and two stepsisters, Adri and Pearl and Peony.  Adri, the stepmother is an excellent evil stepmother, and Pearl plays the part of the evil stepsister quite well, too.  Peony, on the other hand, despite fitting the role of spoiled stepsister well, she is Cinder's friend and the two girls do love each other and care for each other a bit, which is a nice divergence.  Peony is still quite flat as a character though, but that's totally in line with what I remember from the story of Cinderella.

Iko, the hilarious android sidekick, would then be the equivalent to Cinderella's animal friends and helpers.  I know it might be a little bit of a stretch, but she helps Cinder out with all her chores, tries to cheer her up when she's down, and generally wants Cinder to be happy and go to the ball just like Cinderella's furry sidekicks did.  The mice I remember from the Disney version were quite pure in their interactions with each other and Cinderella, and so is Iko.  She is quite frank and eager, which makes her really adorable and a nice comic-relief.

Then there's the Prince.  As mentioned above, Kai is so flat.  SO FLAT.  But wasn't the prince in the original tale as well?  The Prince has more of a focus and important role in Cinder, but the Prince was always a side character and not the main character.  He only serves as a love interest and key to Cinderella's escape from her family, and in a way, he does serve that purpose in this novel.  He's just a handsome face, which does kinda suck because we have to watch him make so many noob mistakes and wonder how did he even get this far as heir to the throne.  So it'll be interesting to see if he does evolve in the books to come.  Because he's so one-dimensional, there's a lot of room to grow, a.k.a. room for character development.

There are lots of other cute references to Cinderella like Cinder's foot being the glass slipper, and SPOILER!  Kai picks that shit up after it falls off of Cinder at the steps before losing her to prison.  Pretty nice wrap up there to the Cinderella story although it doesn't end with a happy ending like the Disney version, which is fine with me.  Cinder does get to escape from her family but not from prison and into the prince character's arms, heh heh.  Cinder really likes Kai, but she always reminds herself to snap out of the fairytale since there's shit to do, which is a diversion I appreciate.

Another thing is that the getaway vehicle Cinder works so hard to repair is an ancient orange gas car that Iko refers to as a "rotting pumpkin."

The car’s dome-shaped body was a yellow-orange shade that looked sickly under Iko’s light— a color that no one in modern times would choose— but with the antique style of the vehicle it bordered on charming. Rust was creeping up from the hollow beneath the shattered headlights, arching along the dented fender. One of the back windows was missing, but the seats were intact, albeit mildew covered and torn and probably home to more than just rodents. The steering wheel and dash seemed to have suffered only minor damage over the years. “Maybe it could be our escape car.”

Meyer, Marissa (2012-01-03). Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles Book 1) (p. 45). Feiwel & Friends. Kindle Edition. 

Super cute!  The lit nerd in me is squealing!  It's dome-shaped like a pumpkin!  And there were RATS in it!  Yay, allusions!  So yeah, I really liked this.  It was fun noticing all the things that matched the Cinderella story I grew up reading and watching.  It's tight.

So...

I like this book.   I'd recommend it, especially if you like any of the following: YA fiction, things that hark back to folklore and fairytales, Cinderella, robots, future settings, moon people, and the supernatural.  :)

P.S. - This was a cool blog post I found on this book where the blogger talked about how there are Sailor Moon references.