Review: Scarlet

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Scarlet is the second book in The Lunar Chronicles, offering a wonderful follow up to Cinder.

Whilst I did enjoy Cinder, I wasn’t as blown out of the water as I had hoped to be considering the hype surrounding the book. I enjoyed it, yes, but it was nowhere near earning a spot on my top ten young adult books. Nevertheless, I was eager to dive into book two. Sadly, I ended up waiting quite some time before I was able to dive into book two.

In all honesty, I was a bit worried at first when I started Scarlet. It took me a while to get into the added storyline, to come to enjoy the new characters. I found myself wanting to go back to the characters we came to know and love in book one, found myself wanting more than just the little snippets we were being given. It took me quite a while, I’ll be honest, but in the end I came to really enjoy the new characters and storyline. In fact, once everything came together, I found I enjoyed book two even more than I enjoyed book one.

Scarlet carries on the storyline of Cinder, moving The Lunar Chronicles forward through the introduction of new elements that mix well with what was introduced to us in the first book. There is no doubt I will be picking up Cress, book three, to see what happens to the new characters I have come to enjoy and the see how the big events play out following the details that came to light in this book.

As with the first book, however, I had a bit of an issue with the fairy-tale element of the story. It wasn’t thrown in your face in quite the same way in this one, which I really enjoyed, offering odes to the original fairy-tale instead of twisting it to be a clear twist of the story into science fiction. Despite enjoying how it was toned back somewhat, I still believe the story would be more enjoyable if it wasn’t making such blatant references and twists to well known stories. I know there has been a trend as of late to take the original fairy-tales and twist them, but in this case I think the books would stand up just fine if they weren’t making the references. I feel as though it is an attempt to pull more people in, to pull in the fans of fairy-tales, when it could have been just fine alone. This is just my view, though, as I know many love the fairy-tale spins throughout this series.

Overall, though, I certainly enjoyed Scarlet more than I enjoyed Cinder. A lot has been opened up for the future of this series, and I cannot wait to see how things come together in the future books.

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