Scarlet – Marissa Meyer

Release date: 5 February 2013
Rating: ★★★★★★★★ – 8/10
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Scarlet is the fairytale retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and is book two of the Lunar Chronicles series.  I definitely enjoyed this book more than Cinder.  Don’t get me wrong, Cinder was a good adaptation, but (just in case you missed my review) REALLY predictable.  This one less so, which was nice.

The storyline was well crafted, again better than in Cinder, with more plot twists.  We start the book hours after the end of Cinder, with the world gossiping about the ball, Cinder, the Emperor and the Lunar Queen.  No one really has the full story of what happened, and certainly no one, with the exception of Cinder herself and Dr Erland, even know Cinder’s real identity.

The story jumps around a little between three main characters’ points of view, always in the third person, which I felt was good.  It gave a more complete picture of what was happening, and what you didn’t see happen you heard about either through another main character watching a netscreen comm or news feed.

We had lots of the characters from Cinder return, as well as some new characters.  Cinder, Kai, Iko and Levana are all still key characters, and we are introduced to Thorne, Scarlet (Red Riding Hood) and Wolf as additional new mains.  We also temporarily meet Scarlet’s grandmother, Michelle Benoit, and Wolf’s brother Ran.

In terms of the older characters, I didn’t really feel that there was a great deal of character development.  Cinder accepts who she is, and Kai makes a huge decision, but the rest just sort of carry on as they did in book one.

Of the new characters, I particularly liked Wolf.  I couldn’t tell if he was good or bad, and as soon as I decided one way he went and did something that made me question my choice.  That was the making of a great character; however, I wasn’t happy with how they left him at the end of the book – that was a little too kitsch for me.

I accidentally read a spoiler for the next two books in the series.  When I marked Scarlet as ‘finished’ on Goodreads it shows my friends reviews, and as someone had done a re-read they went on to explain about couples in the following two books (in the first line of their review – NOT COOL guys).  So that’s semi-annoying, and I am less excited to read Cress now.  Not that I won’t read it, I just probably won’t run out and get it instantly.**

All in all, I enjoyed it,

** Full disclosure, I absolutely went out and bought Cress and Winter the day after finishing Scarlet…