Winter by Marissa Meyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My rating for this book is probably more of 3.7 or 3.8 than it is an actual three, but they don't let us put decimals on here, so I used the descriptor "liked it" to make my rating choice.

"Liked it" is a good way to describe my feelings about this book. There were lots of things to like about it, really. The general sci-fi fairytale concept is probably the strongest selling point of the whole series. (I mean, Rapunzel in a satellite that crashes to earth??? SO cool!)

Cress is my favorite of the four main ladies, and Thorne is easily the most interesting guy in the book. Kai is lovable, which totally fits him, but he frustrated me at times with his inconsistent behavior. I wanted him to either truly own his duties as an emperor, or mess everything up because he was young and inexperienced. His weird blend of capable-and-purposefully-foolhardy started to wear on me after a while. Scarlet came across as mean rather than tough in this book. Perhaps it had something to do with the long break between reading #3 and #4. I thought she could have been a little more sympathetic to Winter's condition when she realized the girl meant her no harm and was treating her well. I didn't feel like Scarlet's later concern and care was as sincere as it could have been because she was so rude at the beginning.

The biggest problems with this book for me were length and a tendency for some of the characters and relationships to be too similar to one another after a while. The book is far longer than it needed to be. She has two big confrontations between Levana and Cinder, two dramatic attempts on Winter's life, two spectacular ceremonies, etc. It left me wondering if there was not some way to have cut the other characters down so that the story could focus mostly on Winter and Cinder, or to have condensed the Snow White side of the story a little more. The elaborate nature of the Lunar world resulted in a LOT of description of things that people in the middle of fighting or running probably would never have noticed. As for the characters and their relationships becoming similar, there were numerous times where I couldn't remember which couple I was following because they were all leaving kisses on the forehead or saying essentially the same things to one another. The individual differences of the characters didn't balance it out enough. And Winter was too much like Cress and Cinder to actually be her own unique individual, in spite of her craziness. Oh, and her sanity shifts between being totally lucid and knowledgeable one minute and crazy the next were a bit of a stretch for me to believe.

I would have only taken off one star for these things, but another star had to come off in protest of my biggest beef with the whole series: the loose morals included in the world-building of the series. Escort droids, the Lunar aristocratic indecency, Levana's romantic manipulations in "Fairest" (basically the entire book... it deeply disturbed me). I just think the series could have stood on its own without adding this element. Manipulating people is bad enough... does Meyer have to be so overt with the cultural acceptance of these things too? Personally, I don't think so.

Oh, and the book is gory... much more than I felt it needed to be.

Anyway, I did finish the book in spite of these things because Meyer did a good job of drawing me in and making want to know what happened to Cinder and the gang. I agree with other reviewers that the ending left something to be desired, but overall the book was interesting, and the twists Meyer introduced to the original fairytales were great. She has always been very good at that.




View all my reviews