Marissa Meyer’s Cinder is better than everyone makes it out to be, but it isn’t life-altering either.

There have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of negative reviews about Cinder, Marissa Meyer’s first book in her Lunar Chronicles series. Having read both the first book and the reviews, I understand the criticism and am partly sympathetic to them.

Meyer takes a bold new approach to the fairy tale retelling, setting this new series far into the future where humans, cyborgs, androids, and Lunar colonists are the norm and one Cyborg-Mechanic, Cinder, is swept up in a plot to take over Earth. Meyer builds a rich new world, one that is a breath of fresh air to the stale fairy-tale retelling trope. This was the biggest stand-out for me and has stayed with me well beyond reading it. And while some time has passed since having read it, Meyer’s world is what keeps begging me to come back to the series.

However, what has kept me away from the series is the Characters themselves and their involvement with the plot. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue between characters is charming and often, at times witty, however, there is little substance beyond that. At times I found myself questioning Characters’ motives which, had the world and character dialogue not been so wonderfully crafted, would have left me somewhat puzzled and, I suspect, would have broken immersion. 

The “Big Twist” is entirely predictable, but that didn’t prevent me from enjoying the story. I imagine that a lot of the negative buzz surrounding this book is due to the plot’s twist, but I took it with a grain of salt as the Lunar Chronicles is technically classified within the Teen genre and not Young Adult. If you go into this book with this in mind, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised and, dare I say, slightly smitten.