Book #69: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

OH MAN. We were out of town for two weeks in Utah and I actually read/listened to a bunch of books while we were gone and I have so many books to write about on here now. Yikes. I actually finished listening to this one before we left, but I didn't have a chance to write about it with all the packing and craziness of leaving town with three small children. (Seriously, it seems like a lot of children when you're trying to pack up all the things you need to bring with them.) But I remember it pretty well since I have been listening to all the other books in this series since then--which shows that I enjoyed it enough to follow through on the rest of the series.

I feel like Marissa Meyer was sitting one day and had the thought--what if Cinderella didn't lose her shoe when she was running away from the prince, but instead--her foot? That seems like the whole idea behind this retelling of Cinderella. Cinder is a cyborg, in a futuristic New Beijing (the old Beijing was destroyed during WWIV), and her arm and leg are totally made out of machinery. In this world, cyborgs are second-class citizens, and Cinder is a super-skilled mechanic who one day gets an exciting famous customer: Prince Kai, who has a very important broken droid who he needs help getting repaired. And the story goes on from there. Of course, since it's a dystopian futuristic story, Cinder can't just be a girl who falls in love with the prince, but also the beginning of a rebellion against an evil queen as well. But I really liked some of the details of this story--like the cyborg/android aspects of the world, the letumosis plague sweeping the world, and Cinder's hilarious flawed-personality-chip android Iko. The big plot twist came on pretty obvious to me (I won't spoil it), but that didn't really bother me too much.

Some other things did bother me though. Like, okay. There's an evil queen who rules the moon, and the moon people are like a totally different species than earthens because they have magical powers. (Why are there queens in the future? Nobody is going to have queens in a thousand years!) And the moon queen wants to take over earth, but she can't do that without MARRYING THE EMPORER? So she has to marry Kai? Ummmmm. What? And I'm sorry, but there is no way on earth that Kai would talk like an insolent teenager in these important diplomatic conversations with all the other earth leaders and the evil queen of the moon. His obnoxious attitude really got annoying and was totally unbelievable. There's no way he was that poorly trained when he was next in line for the throne. I was also really confused about why Prince Kai would be interested in Cinder in the first place. What on earth did she do to attract his attention? She fixed his droid, but it's not like they ever had any interesting conversations... It didn't make sense to me. BUT those annoying parts were smaller than the overall story, which I enjoyed--I just wanted to rant about them somewhere.

**Note: I listened to this on audiobook and I highly recommend it in that fashion. The narrator was fantastic and did excellent voices for each of the characters that really helped me to get the story. I think that helped me to get over some of the more annoying plot points that would have been overly obnoxious if I had been reading it.