Winter by Marissa Meyer Review

Winter 

By Marissa Meyer

Book four of The Lunar Chronicles

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Genres: YA Fiction, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Romance

Winter is book four of The Lunar Chronicles, so make sure you read books one to three (reviews here: Cinder, Scarlet, Cress) first. 

"I need him as much as he needs me. But that doesn't make it love."

Winter lowered her lashes. "Actually, dear friend, I suspect that is precisely what makes it love."

Princess Winter is said to be beautiful. She is looked up to by many citizens of Luna for her kindness, grace and beauty, not just physically, but the beauty of her heart as well. Some even believe that, despite her scars, she is better looking than Queen Levana, her stepmother. Queen Levana has never liked Winter for this reason exactly, plus her attempts to persuade the people of Luna to dislike her have all failed. Scaring her face only made her more beautiful, and forcing her to watch the public, and often gruesome, trials that Winter hates hasn't quelled her spirit yet. But when Winter falls in love with her guard Jacin, she knows that if the queen were ever to find out, it would be very easy for her to hurt Winter. 

Meanwhile, there is talk of a rebellion stirring across Luna, spread by none other than Cinder, the lost Princess Selene of Luna, and her gang of renegades: Captain Thorne, Cress, Iko and Wolf. Along with the help of Emperor Kai, who is becoming desperate for a way to escape his marriage to Queen Levana, they have come up with a plan to smuggle themselves onto Luna to rescue Scarlet and restore Cinder to her rightful place, the throne of Luna. 

Cinder, Scarlet, Cress and Winter have one last chance to defeat Queen Levana and find their fairytale happy ending. 

"We may be animals, but we will never again live in your cage."

Winter was a pretty good conclusion for the series compared to what I was expecting. There were parts of the book that I really liked, and some little parts that I loved, but there are still places where it could have been better. I'll start with a positive: a scene that I found super sweet was Wolf/Ze'ev's reunion with his mother in RM-9. We usually don't see Wolf displaying much emotion in front of the other characters, aside from Scarlet, so his behaviour in this scene was absolutely adorable. It was one of those parts of the book that I could see clearly in my head, as if it were a movie. I think that it also warmed me up a little more to Wolf, who I've not liked as much as some of the other characters in the series. 

Another part I liked in the book was the short chapter we got in Pearl's point of view. Obviously, as one of the 'ugly sisters' and a terrible sister to Cinder, I didn't particularly like her at all, but this chapter at least made me appreciate some of the struggles she has had, though I can't say I dislike her any less because of it. My problem with Pearl is that whilst some of the events that have passed have been a bit damaging, the damage isn't really done to her, it's to her 'reputation'. As well as this, she doesn't ever consider how much worse Cinder has it compared to her, and instead continues acting badly towards her. This chapter completely solidified all of my earlier thoughts towards her, and confirmed that she couldn't really be changed, which I liked because the book needed a character that was still 'evil', but not to the same extremes of evil as Queen Levana.

Now on to the negatives of the book. Firstly, it was long. I'm no stranger to reading lengthy YA books, especially from this genre, but with Winter I could feel how long it was. When I pick up a long book like this, I want to be sure that I will be motivated to read it throughout, and unfortunately Winter often felt like it was dragging on a bit in my opinion. I'm going to blame this mostly on that it was a very 'action-heavy' storyline this time around. Pretty much all of the book was focussed on Cinder fighting and inspiring other people to come fight with her, which ended up just feeling a bit repetitive after a while. I knew when I was going into the book that it was focussed on this, but I think what bored me was that instead of a couple of big fight scenes with noticeably high stakes, it was made up of lots of little rebellions and fights ending in one fairly big fight. This made me loose interest and feel less invested in the whole book in general.

The other thing I didn't like was that Luna felt like big rip-off of Panem from The Hunger Games. It was quite easy for me to spot the similarities between the two: there was one leader, whose word was law; the leader lived in a city chock full of over-indulged and overly privileged rich people; the rich all profited off of the everybody else who lived in sectors where they slaved away for little pay and no chance of escape from their horrendous living conditions; and most of the sectors did not like the rich people living in Artemisia but were too scare to rebel until a figurehead came to rally them, with the exception of a few who were loyal to the rich. RM-9, for me, was the worst from all this since it seemed almost identical to District 12, they are both mining sectors and the character that came from that sector was bereaved of their father, who had a death related to mining. I understand that it's impossible to create a dystopian world without similarities to Panem, but this just takes the biscuit - it was way too similar for my liking.

Overall, Winter was a decent conclusion to the series. The ending satisfied me enough, as everybody gets their own fairytale ending, however the book could have been quite a bit better as a whole. I'd still recommend reading the series, but it might take a little extra energy to get through the entire thing. I don't think I'll be trying any other books by Marissa Meyer or rereading the series in the near future, but I definitely haven't written her off the list of authors that I'd read books from.

"No one is dying for you. If anyone dies today it will be because they finally have something to believe in. Don't you even think about taking that away from them now."