Cinder

Cinder

Lunar Chronicles 1

Marissa Meyer

My copy is a... Paperback

Published: January 2012

Publisher: Feiwel and Friends

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Summary: Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. 
Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future. (via Goodreads)

After hearing TONS about how amazing this book is I picked it up while I was killing time in a bookstore. I didn’t end up buying the book because I didn’t have any money on me but I ordered it from the library and ended up being fairly impressed by it, although there were parts that bugged me.

To start with the things that bugged was there was very little world building. The concept of “New Beijing” is very interesting but very little of the history of New Beijing and the culture, other than class/race differences was explained. The cast system was never fully explained either. In Cinder's case she became a cyborg in order to save her life and she was considered a lower class. If somebody had a cyborg eye installed because they wanted it would they then be considered a lower class? or if a solider/amputee got a cyborg limb?
 Another problem I had with this book was the cover. While the cover was beautiful it did not represent Cinder at all. First of all, Cinder doesn’t have skin graphs, skin covering her robot arm and leg. Therefore the leg on the cover should be a robot not human/robot leg. Also, Cinder would never wear the red kitten heels featured on the cover. I understand that they are used to help relate the story to Cinderella but they don’t fit the story at all, In my opinion it should have been a boot. Lastly, the story was predictable. The big cliff hanger/end that makes you scream give me the next book now!, (if you need farther examples look at The Mark Of Athena by Rick Riordan, If I Stay by Gayle Foreman, 13 gifts by Wendy Mass, or Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins) I predicted in the first 50 pages. I’m not saying what the event is but the clues were laid out in such a way that your groaning at Cinder to figure it out already!

Despite all that there were many parts of the book that I enjoyed. I have not been able to find a dystopian novel with a strong plot in a long time, making this book a very nice break from the contemporary fiction I’ve been reading. Another part of the book I liked was the fact that while there was a love interest the story focused more on species/racial problems instead of the love interest. In my opinion this story read more like a prequel then the first installment in a trilogy.

Rating:

3.5 stars

This was a great dystopian book to read, the writing was much better than the other dystopians I have read recently. However, some elements(world building, characters, etc.) missed the mark for me. 

Noggin

Noggin

John Corey Whaley

Published: April 8, 2014
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
My copy is a..... Hardback I bought

Goodreads 

Summary: Listen — Travis Coates was alive once and then he wasn’t. Now he’s alive again. Simple as that. The in between part is still a little fuzzy, but he can tell you that, at some point or another, his head got chopped off and shoved into a freezer in Denver, Colorado. Five years later, it was reattached to some other guy’s body, and well, here he is. Despite all logic, he’s still 16 and everything and everyone around him has changed. That includes his bedroom, his parents, his best friend, and his girlfriend. Or maybe she’s not his girlfriend anymore? That’s a bit fuzzy too. Looks like if the new Travis and the old Travis are ever going to find a way to exist together, then there are going to be a few more scars. Oh well, you only live twice.

I would have never read this book if I hadn’t seen a panel with John Corey Whaley on it. I am so happy I did see him because this book is amazing. Noggin was amazingly funny. The way Travis dealt with all the changes that happned while he was dead was so pure with no ulterior motive. He just wanted his life to be how it was before he got sick.

In a lot of books similar to this I saw that I wish there had been more of a background. With Noggin I didn’t think this once. The story starts with him waking up, no longer dead. If there had been chapters from before he died it would have felt out of placed. There were flashbacks throughout the book of before he died and it was enough that we got a sense of his life pre-death.

Characters:

Travis: When Travis woke up he expected for everyone to have not moved on, to have waited and stopped his or her lives while he was away. Yet when he slowly realized that hadn’t happened and his best fried, Kyle, wouldn’t be in his math class and his girlfriend was engaged, to a man other than him. He dealt with the majority of the changes as well as he could. In some ways people expected him to act the age he would be if he didn’t die.

Verdict:

3.5 stars

This book is hilarious and defiantly worth a read.

Revived

Revived
By Cat Patrick

Goodreads

Okay so this book I went into a little bit skeptically. The summary of it made it sound slightly creepy and I HATE creepy books! But I had loved Cat Patrick’s other novel forgotten and I have to say I loved this one just as much.

At the begging of the book we hear how Daisy, the MC was killed in a bus crash when she was young. An experimental drug, known as revive was tested on her and since then she’s been “revived” five times. The only thing that really bugged me about this book is we never really learned what happened to Daisy’s parents, which really bugged me. At one point we hear that she lived with nuns before the crash but we don’t learn much about her past before the crash. I wish we could have learned more about it.

Characters:

Daisy: obsessions: Matt, Revive, Megan, and Revive. Daisy isn’t my favorite character ever. She seemed clueless about the world around her and bugged me a bit. When she did decide to try and make friends after being revived for the first time I didn’t like how she became best friends with the first girl she met. I love Audrey she’s amazing but that just seemed unrealistic to me.

Mason: obsessions: revive, Daisy. Although it seems like Mason and Daisy were just kinda thrown together, I loved the relationship between them. Half the time it was as if they were acting, pretending to be a father/daughter, but the other half you could see how much they cared for each other

Verdict:

Support your local library, rent it!