Book Review: Cress (Lunar Chronicles #3) by Marissa Meyer

Cress (Lunar Chronicles #3) by Marissa Meyer

Quick Stats

Author: Marissa Meyer

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Year: 2014

Genre(s): Sci-fi, Fantasy

# of Pages: 560

Summary (Via Goodreads)

Rapunzel’s tower is a satellite. She can’t let down her hair—or her guard. In this third book in the bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they’re plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and her army.

Their best hope lies with Cress, who has been trapped on a satellite since childhood with only her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker—unfortunately, she’s just received orders from Levana to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue goes awry, the group is separated. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a high price. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing stop her marriage to Emperor Kai. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only ones who can.

The Review

This is the third book in Marissa Meyer's series the Lunar Chronicles and has proven to be quite the read! Highlights of this book were the characters, the plot and the action. So here it goes!

I was excited to find out that this book would be based on Rapunzel but at the same time I had some fears. My first fear was that Cress would just end up having the whole damsel in distress complex throughout the entire book and just wait for someone to rescue her. Thankfully, I was wrong! Cress turned to be a geeky and lovable character who used her hacking abilities to spy on Earthens for Levana and also help out Cinder and her team...without them knowing. I love how Cress represents tech savvy girls out there unlike a lot of YA novels I've read. Next, I feared that integrating Cress into the plot would be awkward. When I saw how Marissa Meyer seamlessly integrated Cress by throwing her and another character (I won't say who, but let's just say I was glad it was them!) into a tough situation I was pleasantly impressed.

As for the plot it moved somewhat slowly in some spots but was made up for with the action that I've come to love about this series and some character development. I liked how the characters had a set goal and a set plan so that there weren't any unnecessary portions added to this book. At the same time, Marissa Meyer highlighted the fact that you can't plan for everything and that was evident in the novel. By doing this, she put the reader on an emotional roller coaster, so when a writer gets some emotion out of me I know they're doing something right. On the other hand, I wasn't connected to Cress as strongly as I was connected to Scarlet or Cinder. but hopefully we'll see her develop in the next novel Winter.

Finally, the best for last..the ACTION! No I've never been one for action movies or novels but Marissa Meyer has integrated the action that spices up this book perfectly into the plot. In Cress, we see Cinder develop her Lunar powers and it comes in handy in a lot of situations. What keeps me coming back to these scenes is how there isn't any overkill and it's not overly dramatized at all. It's as realistic as you can get in a sci-fi novel and I love it!

Final Verdict

I'm giving Cress a rating of 4.5/5 because of the excellent character development, action packed plot and the introduction of a new character.