1/18/2024 0 Comments Cinder books in order![]() ![]() What DID bother me about the whole New Beijing setting was tied to weaknesses in the worldbuilding. Queen Lavana is intricately described.but this is a touch ironic, considering her appearance is a telepathically reinforced lie. The same goes for Cinder, the two stepsisters, and whatever the stepmother looks like sans makeup. I'm still not clear on what Prince Kai looked like, aside from black hair and handsome-by-general-consensus. Add to that, there seems a deliberate sparseness of physical descriptors for a majority of main and side characters. It's set (presumably) so far in the future, I would expect a significant genetic muddling to have taken place by then. Side Note: I'm not among those who have some huge ethnicity beef with this book. And by “more and less than human” I mean they've turned into a reclusive race of telepathically-manipulative, technologically-superior beings controlled by one uber-vain brainwashing queen who brazenly slaughters all who do or might oppose her sociopathic will. In Cinder's world, characters throw around words like “intergalactic,”and the moon has been long ago colonized by humans who have-through unspecified means-become something both more and less than human. There are hints that this is taking place many centuries farther in the future-or perhaps in some alternate version of our reality's future (my personally favored theory). Each resulting nation seems to run its own form of sovereign government-the story taking place in the “Eastern Commonwealth,” a monarchy with New Beijing at its center. ![]() Readers will gather that it's been 125+ years since World War 4 decimated large portions of the population and somehow resulted in a joining together of countries into a conglomerate of six nations-which generally sound like they're based on the six habitable continents. How far in the future the book is set isn't clear. But despite the questionably-justified (and minimally explored) suspension of human rights for cyborgs-and the looming threat of an incurable (but vaguely explained) pandemic-this story really doesn't have that gritty dystopian aftertaste. (Nope.haven't seen that before!) There's no fairy godmother to be had, and the closest thing Cinder has to benevolent animal companions is an outdated, pleasantly dysfunctional android named Iko. In a market flooded by retellings, this twist on Cinderella offers a cyborg grease-monkey heroine with a spitfire attitude and a bad case of technologically-induced amnesia. The cyberpunk fairytale concept is intriguing. Instead it took me until 2/3rds of the way through the book to arrive at this crucial genre and target-audience specification. If I'd looked at it this way up front, I'm sure I would have been in a better mindset to enjoy the read rather than getting hung up on the many scientific and medical aspects that required a suspension of logic/disbelief. Firstly, I want to (hopefully) save some readers the confusion and label this book as Syfy-Fantasy-Lite, with a feel on the middle-grade end of the YA spectrum. ![]()
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