Poudelivre

For the past few years, young adult series have become increasingly popular and so the authors started to expand their worlds when the readers asked for it. By now, many series are accompanied by a short story or sometimes even a short story collection. Such is the case with Marissa Meyer’s the Lunar Chronicles. Her four books about Cinder, Scarlet, Cress and Winter goes hand in hand with a short story collection called Stars Above.

I love Meyer’s world and the story about Cinder so it felt natural to get Stars Above to my collection as well and I’m glad I did. In half a dozen short stories, Meyer expands not only the world of the Lunar Chronicles but also the characters themselves. We meet a young Cress when she’s first taken to her satellite, we get to see how Scarlet’s grandmother got to take care of Cinder when she was little and later how Linh Garan adopted Cinder and her first few weeks in her new family. Carswell Thorne gets his own short story in “Carswell’s guide to being lucky”, a hilariously funny read about this charming guy and all the crazy things he did before he ended up in Cinder. We get to see Winter’s and Jacin’s friendship before Cinder entered their lives as well as what Ze’ve did before he was deployed to Earth. In “The Mechanic”, we get to see Prince Kai’s side of his very first conversation with Cinder and in “Something old, something new” the readers find out what happened after the end of Winter. Meyer have also added another short story, called “The Little Android” which takes place in the same world as Cinder but doesn’t have anything to do with the Rampion crew, although it’s a sweet love story and well worth reading.

All these separate short stories adds to the already rich world Meyer has created and to be able to delve deeper into it, to see moments and aspects of the story that you only heard of in passing in the novels was really amazing. I enjoyed this collection a great deal and I think anyone who are interested in these books will as well. Short story collections overall are something I like very much and I do hope there will be even more of them in the future. If you do choose to get Stars Above for yourself I can promise you that you won’t regret it. The content is rich, there are a lot of stories, you will meet all your favourite characters and maybe even a few new ones. I highly recommend this!