Recently, I’ve hit a bad patch of YA trilogy installments. I couldn’t standReached and was quite disappointed by Requiem (side note: I think my days of giving the benefit of the doubt to Lauren Oliver are officially over. Lauren, you and I are through. Sorry.) And then I read — and liked — Scarlet, the second book in the Lunar Chronicles trilogy (remember the first one came out last year, Cinder. I liked it a lot).
I’m wondering if Scarlet is really that much better than those other books, or if I’m just glad it wasn’t terrible. Its been two weeks, and I still don’t know which side I’m on with this.
Scarlet picks up right where Cinder left off, but instead of being a story all about Linh Cinder, lunar princess/cyborg mechanic and her attempt to save handsome emperor Kai from the clutches of the evil lunar queen, we are introduced to a second plot somewhat based on Little Red Riding Hood. Scarlet is a young girl living on a farm in rural France with her grandmother. Scarlet always wears a red hoodie. When her grandmother goes missing, she teams up with a strange, handsome, new guy in town named Wolf.
Scarlet and Wolf race to Paris to attempt to save her grandmother, who is in trouble for hiding some big secret.
And just maybe, that secret has something to do with the young lunar princess who was secretly adopted in France before moving to Beijing years ago.
While it took me a while to warm up to the new characters (really, at first I was annoyed when the chapter POV was about Scarlet, when all I wanted was to find out more about Cinder), after a few chapters I was into the new story. I liked some of the new characters better than others (verdict is still out on Wolf, but I enjoyed the comic relief of Carswell Thorne), and I’m looking forward to seeing how Meyer integrates all of these characters into the next books (one I think will be based on Rapunzel, and one on Snow White).
You can read more of my reviews on my blog.
Cannonball Read V 