Author: Marissa Meyer

Publisher: Puffin

From Amazon
A forbidden romance.

A deadly plague.

Earth’s fate hinges on one girl . . .

CINDER, a gifted mechanic in New Beijing, is also a cyborg. She’s reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s sudden illness. But when her life becomes entwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she finds herself at the centre of a violent struggle between the desires of an evil queen – and a dangerous temptation.

Cinder is caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal. Now she must uncover secrets about her mysterious past in order to protect Earth’s future.

This is not the fairytale you remember. But it’s one you won’t forget.

Review
Cinderella meets cyborgs. Perhaps it doesn’t sound like a winning combination but surprisingly it works really rather well!

I have to admit I bought Cinder about a year ago because the reviews for it were glowing and I figured it everyone else loved it so would I, especially as I am loving fairy tale retellings at the moment. But it stayed on my shelf unread and unloved until the recent Scarlet came out – reviews have started coming out for this now and it finally pushed me to pick Cinder up. I’m so glad I finally did!

I really enjoyed seeing Cinderella get this new lease of life, like the description says it’s certainly not the Cinderella I remember it’s a future version with an almost (but not quite) dystopian feel to it. I certainly don’t remember reading about illness in the, erm, disneyfied version!

And the Prince has a much greater role to play – Prince Kai is in Cinder something of a main character with feelings and a Dad (an emperor at that!). He’s not chasing around after a girl whose feet fit a glass slipper he’s after a mechanic that can save them all.

I loved that we saw a relationship develop between Cinder and Prince Kai, they met in what could be pretty normal circumstances in the future. Just like we might take a car to a mechanic to fix so he would take a broken android to a mechanic. And I loved how their paths in life kept crossing almost as if they are meant to find each other.

Of course things never run smoothly (where would the fun be if they did?) and especially with the Lunar Queen threatening to make war on Earth, oh yes – Earth, not a country things are about to get a little tricky.

Lets just say the Lunar Queen is not someone you’d want to meet in a dark street, she’ll seem all nice and sweet but underneath beats the heart of a woman with a heart of stone and who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Needless to say I didn’t like her. Not. One. Bit!

A special mention has to go to the Doctor, we see him first running these antidote tests on a cyborg and the end result I have to say didn’t warm me to him. But I very quickly realised that he was doing the best he could under the circumstances and seemed pretty harmless. In fact he became a sort of father figure to Cinder, helping and guiding her and above all trying to keep her safe.

Overall, Cinder is a story packed full of gripping action, characters that I felt myself caring for and cyborgs. Read this if you want a refreshing twist on the classic fairytale!