Date Read:
July 7th, 2017 – July 27th, 2017
Rating: 
Format:
Physical Paperback
Summary:
Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together they’re plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and her army.
Their best hope lies with Cress, who has been trapped on a satellite since childhood with only her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker; unfortunately, she’s just received orders from Levana to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.
When a daring rescue goes awry, the group is separated. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a high price. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing stop her marriage to Emperor Kai. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only ones who can.
Review (Spoilers!):
Does my being able to relate to Cress make me a mentally abused shut-in who relies on my imagination to remain sane? She’s sweet, incredibly smart, and little precious cinnamon roll that I want to keep my pocket! She is very naïve in the beginning, but she matures a lot during her journey. She and Cinder are such amazing role models for girls, especially when it comes to their aptitude for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Once I found out Cress was a shell who was taken away from her parents at a young age I knew she was Dr. Erland’s daughter. I expected their reunion to be filled with happy tears, but it was simply tragic. Dr. Erland really does have the worst timing. I love how the moral ambiguity of his past is tackled and in a way, he redeems himself while simultaneously reaping the consequences of his actions.
At first, I thought that Thorne was a cocky screw-up, but he showed his competence throughout this book. Even through his blindness he was resourceful, looked out for Cress, and encouraged her during their time in the desert. He was right in rejecting her first advances, seeing that he was the first man she’d seen in years. This allowed her to become more grounded (literally and figuratively) and establish a real relationship with him.
I didn’t like Jacin. I thought he was a copy-paste of Wolf with a lot less back story and personality. Ironically, I liked Wolf more. I saw his humanity through his mourning and pitied him during his separation with Scarlet. You know it’s bad when the big bad wolf starts crying over a can of tomatoes.
I wasn’t a fan of how long it took for Kai to realize everything I found out in the last two books about Cinder, but I’m glad he made actions towards fixing certain problems once he reached these epiphanies. But even once he was face-to-face with her and she explaining things to him, he didn’t catch on to the fact that she’s Princess Selene until she spelled it out for him! I started to like his relationship with Cinder a little less the more time they spent apart. Since they had little time together before her arrest, I couldn’t see their relationship as anything more than a mutual attraction at the least. I’m glad they reconciled at the end and I hope their relationship grows even more in Winter.
Cinder shines throughout the course of the story. She’s developing her glamour powers, learning how to become a leader, and her greatest fears are becoming near realities as she braces for the beginning of an intergalactic war. Even if she isn’t able to outwardly express her emotions through tears, her pain and struggles feel incredibly real during chapter sixty-one when she confesses to Kai all of her fears.
Some parts of this book are a bit slow. However, these moments do not go to waste. These chapters help establish solid relationships among the Rampion crew so that their separation is even more tragic. I like seeing the interactions between Cinder and Wolf. It’s an odd combination, but they work well together, as do he and Cress later on. I’m even starting to see Cinder and Thorne’s relationship as a comedic and loving brother-sister dynamic. Is it bad that I didn’t miss Scarlet that much? I wondered what was happening to her once, near the end of part three, but that was it.
I thought that Scarlet would be the scariest book in the series, but Cress had a lot of subtly creepy moments. I shivered. I cringed. I nearly cried. I was afraid for my life.
The plague hardly seemed present in Scarlet, but it returns in Cress with full force and is even more of a threat now. When I discovered the real reason why the plague came to Earth in the first place, my fear and hatred for Levana multiplied by a million. That woman is crazy. I would like to understand what made her this way, but since the chapters in Scarlet and Cress (one in each book) scared me out of my wits just through stepping into her devious mind, I’m a little hesitant about reading Fairest.
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