A review by noellegrace8
Cinder by Marissa Meyer

adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

This is such a cool modern (future, actually??) retelling of Cinderella. She is NOTHING like any Cinderella we've read or watched before. She is a mechnic with a good portion of her body being mechanical in and of itself. Meyer does a fantastic job creating interesting plot points that surprise the reader yet also point them to the original source material of Cinderella. Overall a quick-paced, clever book. I can't wait to read the next installments! The few issues I had with the book were just that it was a bit hard to get into at first, especially because some of the characters weren't as interesting as they could have been, and sometimes the word usage was odd, almost like she used the word adjacent to what she actually meant.

I don't include the audio performer in my overall star review, but I'd give Rebecca Soler 4/5. There isn't much to say outside of her performance falling a bit flat. It wasn't actively bad, but there wasn't enough excitement and variance in her narration to intrigue me; my inner reading dialogue is much more enthusiastic than her performance itself is.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Ableism, Terminal illness, and Pandemic/Epidemic

Moderate: Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Blood, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, and Classism

Minor: Confinement, Gun violence, Mental illness, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, Sexism, Torture, Violence, Xenophobia, Vomit, Car accident, Death of parent, Murder, Colonisation, War, Injury/Injury detail, and Deportation

Those listed in "graphic" are central themes, although the ableism is more of metaphor (Cinder is a cyborg and treated poorly because of it) than a direct commentary. Moderate categories listed are related to the death of a loved one in the plot, a medical research focus due to the epidemic theme, and the aforementioned ordeal of Cinder being cyborg. "Minor" category items are straightforward and not too present in the book.