Review: Cinder

How many YA books have done the retelling of a fairy tale thing before? And how many times has it actually worked? Happily (but maybe not happily ever after), Cinder is a rare exception to the cut-and-paste story retelling formula.

In this book, Meyer takes the well-worn story of Cinderella and places it in a future filled with robots and cyborgs, a very nasty plague, and a cold and menacing queen from the Moon. My first response on hearing the premise was that this was absurd and would surely be a flop. Man, was I wrong! All of these elements add enough of a new twist so that I wasn't concerned about waiting for the moment when this or that might happen.

Cinder, our half-human, half-robot protagonist, is more than you would expect from a story like this (where the original material often gets muted to bare, meaningless bones). She's not just a servant girl to an ungrateful woman - she's smart and strong and can keep her wits about her, even when she's meeting the prince, and yet she's vulnerable and uncertain about what is happening to her. The truth about exactly who Cinder is becomes glaringly obvious well before she figures it out instead, but instead of this annoying me, it left me cheering Cinder on, wanting her to move on until she could figure it out herself.

While Cinder is clearly being marketed as Book One of the Lunar Chronicles (giving a little away there, no?), it would be obvious even without that information that this is just the first step in a series of novels. The story follows the Cinderella tale very closely, but it makes enough jumps and breaks to be its own thing. But the way the story ends leaves me unclear of where it's going to go next (and I'm actually happy about this). I've chatted with a few people, and the obvious thought is that Meyer will tackle a different fairy tale the next time through, but however she presents the story, I'll be there to read it.

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Review: After the Apocalypse

After reading an intensely positive review of this short story collection on i09, I was intrigued enough to order a copy. There are so many post-apocalyptic stories out there, and After the Apocalypse sounded right up my alley.

In fact, the first story of the bunch, The Naturalist, hooked me right away. It takes place in a zombie preserve, where felons are sent to serve out their sentences (as long as they can survive the zombies that wander around the area). However, the big questions of why the zombies were kept in the preserve and why the prisoners were sent there were never answered, leaving me feeling a bit dissatisfied at the end.

My dissatisfaction continued with the rest of the stories in the book. Some had hooks as strong as the first (a huge Chinese corporation that could change the world but basically works on a feudal system, a woman who volunteers for medical testing, people who can inexplicably fly and all want to go to France), while others left me with no desire to continue after only a few paragraphs. In fact, there wasn't all that much apocalypse to speak of either. Maybe I would have been happier if the collection had had a different name?

That being said, I really like Maureen McHugh's writing, just not her stories. She has an eloquent way of describing these screwed-up worlds without using exposition. Instead, details are peppered here and there throughout the story that build the world brick by brick. I would get a little bored, and then there would be only a sentence or two that intrigued me enough to continue. I may seek out more of McHugh's work in the future to see if I enjoy it without the expectations put upon it by such a positive review.


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