BOOK REVIEW: Cress by Marissa Meyer

BOOK REVIEW: Cress by Marissa Meyer

Puffin Books
February 2014
Paperback, £7.99
Reviewed by Aly Locatelli

“Maybe there isn’t such a thing as fate. Maybe it’s just the opportunities we’re given, and what we do with them. I’m beginning to think that maybe great, epic romances don’t just happen. We have to make them ourselves.”

If it weren’t for the characters of this series, this reader may have given up on The Lunar Chronicles after Scarlet. Although the plot is described as fast-paced and addicting, it can drag more often than not, and getting from Point A to B requires far too much energy from the reader. The author fails to explain on numerous occasions why certain things are the way they are, and I don’t believe we ever truly get an explanation as to why the future is the way it is.

Cress picks up shortly after where Scarlet ended. Plans to crash Levana’s wedding to Kai are underway; Wolf is still training Cinder on how to use her Lunar powers on the Lunars; Iko discovers that lunar soldiers on earth have been given dead Earthen chips, which explains how they had been able to stay undetected on Earth for so long.

On her satellite, Cress, a Lunar shell (a Lunar without any powers), who was introduced at the end of Scarlet and popped up once before in Cinder, receives a comm from Cinder asking for evidence that Levana was spying on the Earthens. When Cress agrees, but tells them of the dangers she will encounter by doing so, Cinder, Wolf, Scarlet and Thorne come up with a plan to rescue Cress and free her from Levana’s clutches. As an experienced hacker, Cress would be of great use to them in the future.

But Cress is a hopeless romantic, and hopelessly in love with Captain Carswell Thorne. Being rescued by him is a dream come true, even if he’s not as charming as she’d hoped he’d be.

Cress was convinced that she knew more about Carswell Thorne than anyone else alive. In a life in which newness and novelty were so rare, he has become a fixture of fascination to her.

The rescue doesn’t go as planned. With Sybil on their tail and a crashing satellite, Cress and Thorne must work together to escape. Landing in a desert in the middle of nowhere is a complication all on its own, but then Thorne loses his eyesight and it looks like everything is going from bad to worse. Will they succeed in finding their small group of rebels? And will they succeed in taking back whats theirs, once and for all?

Although I struggled to care for Cinder and Kai, Cress and Thorne more than made up for it. Although they are complete opposites, with Cress romanticising Thorne as much as she can and Thorne chasing anything that had a heartbeat (and some that did not), their chemistry was tangible and real, and it made me ship them incredibly hard. Their storyline was fast-paced, action packed and fun to read, with everything that could go wrong going wrong at the worst possible times, and definitely heart-wrenching in places. Cress is naive and head over heels in love with Thorne, although she comes to a rude awakening when she realises that maybe she’s more in love with the image of him than anything else.

Cress dragged in many places (mostly where Cinder and Kai were involved, unfortunately). At one point, there was a lot of standing around, waiting for something to happen, and not enough actually doing stuff. It wasn’t until the last 20% or so that things finally started happening, and the story finally, finally started rolling.

Overall, a worthy sequel with some unexpected twists that had this reader clutch the book in anticipation, if a tad heavy on the melodrama and unnecessary scenes. Cinder and Kai, I’m looking at you.

(Cress is Book 3 in the Lunar Chronicles series.)

Category: Book Reviews, Other Reviews