(*my overall rating is a 3.5)

cinder is a sci-fi story set in the future that is about a half-human half-cyborg girl who lives in new beijing with her two stepsisters and stepmother. she ends up getting “volunteered” to the research of finding a cure to the current plague.

i had heard so so so so much about cinder before i even considered picking it up. i noticed that it regularly showed up in either hauls pr unhauls, but aside from that i never saw anything else about the story. booktubers constantly said the same thing over and over. “i loved this in middle school but my love for it started to dwindle” blah blah blah. all the exact same critique and stuff like that.

so i wasn’t too interested in picking it up until i was so freaking bored that my crap brain couldn’t think straight and i was suddenly buying it from barnes & noble and reading it.

i loved cider when i began it. cinder was (to me, at the time) a super badass character who accepted things as they were and stood up for herself and stuff like that. but i was wrong. cinder is a very bland, very 1-D character who didn’t really do ANYTHING. cinder just...was. she wasn’t unique, or different from anyone else. to me, a rug would have been more interesting.

and can we talk about how cinder’s only personality trait was that she was a cyborg and she was a mechanic? the only other distinguishing trait i can think of is snarky, and still not much of that.

moving on to the other characters, let’s talk about cinder’s family. first, the sisters. pearl and peony. i was able to appreciate the fact that meyer did go off the original story and didn’t make both of cinder’s sisters total bone-heads. peony was a wonderful character. she was sweet but also sassy. she was your typical teenage girl who had big dreams. the thing is that meyer kills off peony so early on in the story that we can’t really be sad about what happened. she dies before, what, page 100? that, to me, is not enough time to truly care for a character. now pearl was bad. she was just the most average bad stepsister i’d ever read. it was so stupid. the stepmom was also just way too typical.

iko was wonderful. for a robot, she was a heck of a lot more interesting than cinder. i also loved prince kai! he was so adorable and definitely one of my new book boyfriends.

the whole plot thing with queen levana was really interesting! i didn’t think that we were gonna get this space plot in the book but it was a pleasant surprise! i still wish that we had gotten to know levana and the story a little more but i guess not. hopefully we get to know more about it in future stories (which we did, but it still confused me).

the plot was the part where most of my issues lied. while i was reading the book, i found the plot very good! i really loved the plot of the mechanic thing and Prince Kai and the plague and all that stuff, but when i actually finished the book i realized that the story was, even if not directly, super similar to the original cinderella tale.

the ending of the story is what really just put the icing on the cake. what even was that ending? poor prince kai, stupid cinder, annoying queen levana! i was just so angry at the ending (i want to add that i was overexaggerating a lot when i finished it. i still dislike the ending but it’s not as bad as i made it seem.) that it made me not want to even touch the second book.

thank God that scarlet (the second book) was much better. i would high recommend scarlet, even if it meant having to get through cinder.

so yeah. that’s my review that took literal months to get written!

-rebe