[buddy reading]

"I think I realized that I would rather die because I betrayed them, than live because I betrayed you."

[Disclaimer: Shortly after finishing Cinder I discover that this series is considered to be a problematic series. According to some people, The Lunar Chronicles series has an offensive Pan-Asian setting that homogenizes Asia and evokes Japanese imperialism and Marissa Meyer uses honorifics in the wrong way. I think these are valid concerns, but I'm not gonna further my opinion on the matter. Look, I'm a white European girl, I'm not the right person to talk about this issue].

Well, that was disappointing. Like I said in my review of Cinder when I started this series I wasn't expecting much out of it. But then, I loved Cinder. So I was excited to start this book. The Little Red Riding Hood is one of my favorite fairytales and I usually like its retellings. However, this one was disappointing.

The story can be interesting, but I hated Scarlet. We just see her concerned about her grandmother and Wolf. So we don't get to know her as a heroine. And because we don't get to know her, she became too irritating and tedious. I think that the narrative tried to show Scarlet as a reckless heroine but didn't deliver it. Every time I was reading her POV I was rolling my eyes. I found Scarlet to be irritating, tedious, and, sometimes, cringy. And although I liked Wolf, he's not sufficient to make me like their storyline.

The only thing I actually liked in this book was the storyline of Cinder and Kai. Their storyline is much more interesting and Cinder is the true heroine of this book (look, it may be Scarlet's story, but the real badass was Cinder). And Thorne is my new favorite character. I hope to see more of him in Cress. Their storyline is the only thing that prevents me from giving an even lower rating.

I'm pretty sure that this book suffers from "second book syndrome", and the only thing that kept me from DNF'ing was my reading buddies. None of us liked this book, and if it weren't for them, I don't know how I even would finish.

I hope that Cress is better.

"It would be easy to abuse a person when they never recognized it as abuse."

It´s a bit better than the first book, and I really enjoyed the character dynamics. Still not the best in the series. But please continue on with it because it gets better.

This book was much faster paced than the previous one and had a lot more action. In short it is awesome. More of the mystery of Cinder gets unraveled and new interesting characters come into play. Excited for what happens next.

Not quite as exciting as its predecessor, but still holds up as a decent YA scifi, though the red riding hood connection is a little more forced than the other adaptations in the series.