Sixteen year-old Cinder is considered a technological mistake by most of society and a burden by her step-mother. Being cyborg does have its benefits, though: Cinder's brain interface has given her an uncanny ability to fix things (robots, hovers, her own malfunctioning parts) making her the best mechanic in New Beijing. This reputation brings Prince Kai himself to her weekly market booth, needing her to repair a broken android before the annual ball. He jokingly calls it a "matter of national security," but Cinder suspects it's more serious than he's letting on.
Although eager to impress the prince, Cinder's intentions are derailed when her younger sister, and only human friend, is infected with the fatal plague that's been devastating Earth for a decade. Blaming Cinder for her daughter's illness, Cinder's step-mother volunteers Cinder for plague research an "honor" that no one has survived. But it doesn't take long for scientists to discover something unusual about their new guinea pig. Something others would kill for.
Okay, is it sad that this now counts as more posts in one month than in all of last year? What a shallow pool! Anyhow, Cinder! I will say this: I was not particularly heartened by the reviews I read of this, but what I realllllly wanted to read was the forthcoming sequel, Scarlet (which will not be published until, hmm, February, although that has not stopped an alarming number of young ladies from posting gif-filled reviews on goodreads based on ARCs. Screw cyborgs, in the future, all communication will take place via gifs) but you gotta read Cinder first, so read it I did.
Okay, so, just to forewarn you, this review is going to be a lot of "spoilers" (it's in quotes for a reason), and a lot of "I want my fairy tale fantasies to have more reality, myah!" (just go ahead and imagine that whole sentence in Skeletor-voice). So, Cinder (for reasons other than the fact that hundreds of adaptations and variations have been published on roughly the same storyline for hundreds of years) is pretty predictable. The basic facts as we expect them to be in a Cinderella story are: unwanted daughter/loses out on doing something fun/but has a good heart/earns a reward/gets a She's All That style makeover/and some male attention/usually while also giving everyone who was mean to her a karmic kick in the pants. So when you set your story in a futuristic world where people live on the Moon (more on that LATER) and a plague has been sweeping the world, and cyborgs are real, and so on, you give yourself a lot of opportunity to surprise your readers. But intentionally or not, Meyer gives the equivalent of a flashing red beacon to the fact that Cinder is this missing princess from the Moon:
They said [Queen Levana had] killed her niece, her only threat to the throne. Princess Selene had only been three years old when a fire caught in her nursery, killing her and her nanny.
Some conspiracy theorists thought the princess had survived and was still alive somewhere, waiting for the right time to reclaim her crown and end Levana's rule of tyranny, but Cinder knew it was only desperation that fueled these rumors. After all, they'd found traces of the child's flesh in the ashes.
Anyone who doesn't read that (which pops up pretty early on, only 11% of the way through the book) and immediately go, "Well, we've got a missing princess there, and a young lady missing a pound of flesh here....I think I might know where this is going," should maybe consider getting their gullibility meter checked. And once we know that, it becomes less fun, and more of a drag to keep waiting and waiting for Cinder to figure it out, which: 45% of the book until she finds out that she's from the Moon (they say "Lunar" in the book, but I think saying she's from the Moon more accurately expresses how odd I find this concept. And how did they not notice Moon refugees flying in from outer space and landing on Earth? That's never really explained. I mean, we watch every asteroid and meteoroid that gets even fifty thousand miles away, I'd think that we'd have a grasp on people actually landing within our atmosphere by the time this book takes place. Plus, where do people live on the Moon? Is it all indoors? Have they transformed the Moon's atmosphere, because otherwise, how are people movable between both locations? And how come Prince Kai appears to never have seen a Moon spaceship, or Moon building materials before? Hasn't he been going to school? Do we not have cameras anymore? What is going on?!?!) and 98% of the book until she finds out she's the missing princess herself, which is just - by the time that penny drops, I was ready to pull my hair out. Or someone else's hair, but same thing, really.
So, really, the one thing I was surprised by was that her sister (and the king!) actually die of the plague. DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU? After all that, she gets down to Peony in time to hear her last words but not shove the antidote down her throat. I will be real here folks: this reminded me of nothing more than The Hunger Games: a young teenage woman, beset by a dystopic society, will do anything to save her younger, flower-named sister, who is unfailingly gentle and kind, and is, in the end, unable to do so. But you know what? I read two chapters of the Hunger Games and was immediately wrapped up in Katniss' attempts to protect Primrose (so much so that when I found out she doesn't survive the series, I put off reading the third book in the trilogy for over two years) whereas here, I felt nothing when Peony died. That's in part because I am also part cyborg and thus unable to feel human feelings, but also because Cinder just does not engender the same quality of urgency and emotion that The Hunger Games does.
OH! And the other thing, that is brought up (justly) in other reviews, but which I wanted to touch on as well here: what world is this, where they have a deadly plague, but absolutely no quarantine measures? I mean, not even checkpoints for different sections of the city - Cinder just waltzes back after hiding out when her neighbor comes down with it. You know who else has that kind of disease prevention mastery? The CDA in Monsters Inc. Which is a cartoon movie about monsters. As another reviewer said: no wonder they have a problem with this disease. Also, what what what is this place that just allows a seventeen year old prince whose mother is dead and whose father is currently dying to just go waltzing about random marketplaces? This is not Aladdin, y'all, and maybe I should be worried about how many kid's movies have made their way into Cinder. Cinder does have the feel of a mish-mash (and I can't tell you how distracting it was to have "Kai" from the Snow Queen fairy tale, pop up as the prince in this Cinderella story): in addition to everything else I talked about above, for some reason the evil queen kept reminding me of the Wizard of Oz.
It's okay, the book keeps moving along briskly enough that you don't really stop to bitch about all this when reading it. But the constant need to overlook thickheaded narration, weird reality holes, and reminders of other media takes its toll on the overall experience. Cinder did not really keep me rapt, and having read it, I'm not at all on tenterhooks about how Cinder is going to get out of the prison she winds up in at the end of the book. In fact, knowing that she eventually meets up with Scarlet, the main character in the sequel, makes me less interested in reading it. Meyer has a really interesting idea here, and I want it to really shine, the way that it can. For now, though, it's got a wee bit too much polishing that still needs to be done.
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