A Review of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicle Series (spoiler free)

I just finished reading Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles series. It is a series marketed for teenage girls where all the main characters are teenage girls, and I don’t care. I ate the series up. There are six books in the Lunar Chronicles. Theoretically, each of the four main narrative books of the series is a science fiction retelling of a fairy tale: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White. I know what you are saying out there, all you middle-aged men like me. Sounds terrible. Who would want to read that? Well, I would. I did, and I make no apologies.

The reason these books are called the Lunar Chronicle series is because the society (or country) that has developed on the Moon is critical to the series. Earth and Moon societies have a tenuous relationship and have apparently fought wars before. The queen of Luna is ruthless, and there is never any doubt who the villain is.

The point about these being retelling of fairy tales is a bit misleading. Cinderella is the basis for Cinder. Little Red Riding Hood is the basis for Scarlet. Rapunzel is the basis for Cress. And Snow White is the basis for Winter. Each fairy tale sets a very loose framework for the story. A while back I did a review of Cinder and in that review, I said something like: Cinder is no more a retelling of Cinderella than Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is a retelling of The Lord of the Rings. The source material is used for inspiration, but not for plot. It is the same with all the books in this series. If you hadn’t been told that Cress was based on Rapunzel, you would never know. There is just the occasional moment when you recognize an incident or make a connection.

The two other novels in the series are related but are not part of the main continuous narrative. The novel Fairest is a prequel that provides us backstory for the lunar queen Levana. And Stars Above is sort of a prequel-equal-sequel, with each chapter following a different character at a different point in time before, during and after the main series.

So why did I get hooked into the series? It has depth. It has characters I care about. That is probably the main point: characters I care about, and a desire to see justice done against very high odds. I got totally and completely invested in the plot. We explore themes like prejudice and the effect of power. We explore the relationship of good versus evil, but what fairy tale doesn’t do that? I don’t care what age, gender, or race the protagonists are. I rooted for the character Cinder in the same way I rooted for Luke Skywalker the first time I saw Star Wars. You just have to root for an underdog rebel and his/her friends when they go up against an evil empire.

Star Liner

Comments

Second Wind

You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running. In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...

The Outsider

I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...

A Child of the . . .

What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school. It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog