Winter
After disrupting not only the Eastern Commonwealth but also Luna and the entire Earth and quite possibly the rest of the galaxy as well, Linh Cinder is currently floating around in space in Carswell Thorne’s stolen Rampion. There, Cinder and her friends, Thorne, Wolf, Cress and Iko along with the emperor of the Eastern Commonwealth, Kai, is planning how to overthrow the evil Lunar queen, Levana, and rightfully let Cinder, also known as the long-lost Princess Selene, claim her throne and her kingdom. But they all know that a revolution is far from easy and may just end up with them all dead. It also requires that emperor Kai returns to Earth and does his best to get into Levana’s good graces again, so that they can get married and she can be crowned empress. Because if a revolution is to succeed, it has to take place on the planet where Cinder was born and is made to rule. On Luna. And what better way to revolt but during a royal wedding?
I’ve been waiting so long for this and despite knowing that Winter was over 800 pages long I still felt surprised holding it in my hand a few weeks back. It has taken me some time to finish it, both because of its length but also because I knew this was the last book in the series and I wanted to hold on to it for a moment longer. I feel a little sad now that it’s over, but I’m also happy and content, which is a good thing after the high anticipation I've had.
Winter is full of drama and action. 824 pages is a testament to that. It starts of aboard the Rampion, which is a place that I’ve by now started to think of fondly and of something like a home. After that we move over to Luna, where Cinder’s revolution is supposed to be. After a great deal of planing, things turn out quite differently than they were supposed to but after having lived under Queen Levana’s torment rule for a long time, the citizens of Luna more than welcomes Cinder and her claims of being the lost heir to the throne. But the road to the royal palace in the capital of Artemisia is long and more often than not crowded with unspeakable danger.
The thing Meyer has done in her five books in this series is to create five female characters, choose four famous fairytales and retell them with one girl to fit into each book. Cinder, the first novel, is based on Cinderella and Scarlet, the second, on The Little Red Riding Hood. Cress is based on Rapunzel while Winter and Fairest tells two sides of Snow White. This, for me, is unique. I have read fairytale retellings before, but lever quite like this. They are separate girls with their own story but they’re all twisted up in one another’s life. It is actually quite amazing, both the storytelling and the imagination of Meyer.
This book is the story about Winter, the beautiful Lunar princess who is only made even more beautiful by the three scars covering half her face – something her stepmother, the queen, forced her into doing to destroy her own beauty. But the people still lover her, to Levana’s great annoyance, and she sees Winter as nothing more than something she got on her neck after her first husband died. Winter, with no royal blood of her own, just wants to get away from her stepmother and live as peaceful life as possible, hopefully with her guard and childhood friend Jacin, whom she has always loved. But the gift and curse of the Lunar people are their ability to manipulate other people’s bioelectricity which comes in handy when you need someone to do something they don’t want to do, or to force them to kill themselves or hurt people in their surroundings. But for someone who doesn’t use their abilities, the gift soon turn into a curse since they start to become mentally ill. Many who does this ends up killing themselves and Winter, who has refused to use her gift in years, is rushing down that same path. It won’t be long before she is killed, either by the hand of her illness, or by her stepmother.
Cinder has teamed up with people she’s met along the road of these books and it has been so much fun, not only to meet new characters, but also to follow the main characters developments. Cinder starts of as a mechanic in the Eastern Commonwealth, Scarlet is a girl living and working on a farm in France, Cress as a hacker and data genius in a satellite and Winter is a crazy princess on Luna. The four guys that makes appearances, Kai, Thorne, Wolf and Jacin, also goes through their fair share of changes, Jacin possibly the least, but even so, by the end of the story all of the characters have evolved enormously and changed remarkably. To get to follow along on this ride, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet but more often than not, downright horrifying and terrible, has been very interesting and I have loved seeing how the characters reacts to certain situations and how they chose to deal with the particular problem at present hand. It has been one heck of a ride and I have loved every minute of it.
Meyer is great at writing and does so with a swift flourish but also a fun edge. She can make tense situations light and sweet moments horrible with just a few words. It is, at the bottom, a story about a girl who was almost murdered as a child and now has found out her true identity and is ready to claim what rightfully belongs to her. But interspersed with that is four separate love stories and a lot of friendship. The characters have great chemistry and there were many moments of laughter while reading. I love the way Meyer writes and enjoy her stories immensely.
Something I very much appreciated was that Meyer didn’t just blindly kill off characters right and left. So many authors seems to think that the way to get a book to go from good to great is to kill off an important character. I despise this and while I do see why some characters have to be killed, I often ponder why that or that character had to die when it was unnecessary to the story. Meyer doesn’t do this and it made me both happy and relieved. You don’t have to kill important characters for no other reason than killing.
If there is something slightly negative to say about Winter, then it really is the length of the novel. I was very excited at first, because I’ve waited for a long time and the longer the book, the better, I thought. Somewhere around the middle or a bit further I started to get tired and wondered if the novel would ever end. It was still good, but it was so long and though it contained a lot of action, it still felt like it dragged out. I believe it could’ve been shorter, there were parts not quite necessary, but all the same, I enjoyed reading them.
You can see my conflicting emotions here. When I neared the end I regretted my thoughts of 300 pages previously and wished for the novel to be even longer. It took some time for things to really hit the fan, which I understand, but when it finally did it felt like it was over quite quickly. After the big climax the story jumped ahead about three days and the last fifty pages was all a wind-down to sum it all up, basically. This is something I’m happy for, because I hate it when novels end almost right after Everything Has Happened and you're left to wonder for yourself what the hell happened afterwards. Meyer took care of that – to some extent.
She did settle pretty much everything but I was still left with the feeling that the story was unfinished. It felt like she rushed through the end just to wrap it up and skipped a lot of days and a lot of moments which I would’ve liked to be a part of. This book centers so much around Cinder and the revolution, despite being Winter’s book, and it felt like everything and everyone else ended up in shadows, which was a bit disappointing. You still get to follow the other characters, but it was all about that revolution and a lot of other things got less attention than I would’ve liked.
Meyer didn’t leave that many questions hanging in the end, which again was something I liked, but part of me felt like I had the earth removed from under me when I put the book down. It was a nice wrap-up, but after five books and 800 pages in the last one, I would’ve liked just a little bit more. So that I could follow up with the characters and get to say good-bye a little better and maybe, just maybe, have some more tangible indications as to what happened in the future.
Overall, it is a great book and a good finish to a wonderful series. I will truly miss it but I take comfort in the fact that all five is now on my shelf and that I can revisit Cinder, Scarlet, Cress and Winter whenever I feel like it. That being said, I will miss waiting for new material from Meyer and The Lunar Chronicles, though for you who wants to read more about them, there is a short story collection coming out in February 2016. I guess this is a good-bye, but not really since I know without a doubt that I will reread these novels many times in the future. However, I feel a bit melancholy now, but I can’t wait to hear more about Meyer’s future projects and read them as well. She is a terrific writer with great imagination and I recommend this series to whoever wants a ride or two around the moon.