Monday, January 2, 2017

Off the Bookshelf: SCARLET, by Marissa Meyer

The second book of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles, SCARLET is a roller coaster ride and an adaptation of the basic elements of the faerie tale of Red Riding Hood into a science fiction setting, so cleverly done I just have to sit and shake my head and say "wow" enough times to get really irritating.

Scarlet is a redhead, French, a farm girl delivering produce from her grandmother's farm. Her "hood" is a red hoodie, and it gets pretty beat up and shredded by the end of the story. The wolf is a guy named Wolf and yeah, at a couple points in the story, he's "this close" to eating Red -- err -- Scarlet.

Grandma has vanished and Scarlet becomes convinced that Wolf is involved. As she digs into things, she puts enough clues together to realize Grandma knows a lot of dangerous things. See, Grandma was a spaceship pilot, and she was involved with some residents of the moon, and Grandma knows what happened to the missing Lunar princess.

How does this tie into Cinder, who was in prison, waiting to be handed over to the evil Lunar queen at the end of book one? Now, Cinder has broken out of prison and she's on the run and learning a lot of things about her past. In a stolen spaceship, she and her fellow fugitive manage to stay one step ahead of the  military forces hunting her. Just in time, she meets up with Scarlet, and a few more pieces come together.

War has come to Earth, and in some ways, it's Cinder's fault -- or perhaps more accurately, her responsibility. Time for her to accept her destiny, her heritage, find supporters and get a revolution going in time to rescue the handsome prince/newly crowned Emperor, before he's forced to marry the evil queen in what is sure to be the shortest marriage on record.

Read these books!

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