When it comes to fairytale retellings, I hold Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles in high favour. When I first read Cinder I was astounded by the brilliance of this story world and the simple what if? What if we took Cinderella and made it sci-fi? What if we took cinderella and made her a cyborg? What if instead of a shoe, its a foot?

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless Lunar people, inhabitants of the moon, watch and wait to make their move. No one knows Earth’s fate hinges on one girl – Cinder, a gifted mechanic and a cyborg. Cinder is a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. When her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the centre 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 Earth’s future.

Cinder is a wonderful character with a keen sense of situational awareness and understanding. This is in part because of her cyborg enhancements allowing her to tell when someone is lying, but also a result of some great character building. She feels like she is beneath others because of her cyborg elements, and she is well aware of the social and political repercussions of being with Kai. Cinder is kind of kind a tsundere, cold on the outside but loving and attentive under the surface. Kai should also get some props here. He feels like the dutiful son in every sense of the word, yet he is a young man and is given the chance to form a friendship outside of the castle, a friendship that could be more. He is attentive and has a keen sense of awareness. I am very excited to see how their relationship develops.

The choice to have one of the stepsisters be nice to Cinder interesting, and with the events of the book it works incredibly well. It certainly makes sense for the plot progression and the staging of the big reveal. As for the stepmother and older stepsister, they fit the archetypes well and give to the richness of the story world too. How they use and treat Cinder leans into the belief that androids and cyborgs are second-class citizens, deepening the emotional turmoil in Cinder’s mind and leading to some truely horrid yet exceptional plot points. Pair that with the plague sinking its claws into several significant people in the main characters’ lives, and the looming presence of the Lunar queen making every room she walks into fraught with tension, and you have a plot that seems to take from these characters in all directions.

The pacing is set fairly high from the get-go, with Cinder meeting Prince Kai in the first chapter and Cinder’s younger sister catching the plague a few chapters later. The novel is a mixture of action-driven and character-driven which keeps things interesting. Some characters are mysterious, making their intentions murky and trusting them is even more of a gamble. Others are deadly and will command whole spaces, putting others on their toes and challenging their ability to regain control. Then there are those driven by greed or selfishness, and though you know what they will do and who they will manipulate to get what they want, you don’t know how others will react and what the true repercussions of their actions will be. It makes for very engaging interactions between characters and scenes you cannot take your eyes off the page.

I highly recommend this to all. Cinder is an easy read that doesn’t feel like it is too YA to be enjoyed by adult readers. Just keep in mind the characters are YA characters and the prose is filling out a YA trope spread and checklist. I still enjoy it as an avid adult fantasy fan and a budding adult sci-fi reader. As I noted in the beginning, there is a simplicity in the novel’s creation as a sci-fi retelling of a well-known fairytale. There doesn’t need to be all the bells and whistles accompanying it in order for this book to be a fantastic novel. It already is pretty incredible.