Before
I start talking about my thoughts on Winter,
I just wanted to say that since Winter
is the last book in the Lunar Chronicles
series, I’ll be discussing my thoughts on both the book Winter; as well as my thoughts on the series as a whole; that being
said, here are my thoughts on the book.
Right
off the bat, I have to say that as much as I’ve loved The Lunar Chronicles, Winter
is definitely my least favorite book in the main series. However, if you’re somebody
that prefers to lump Fairest: Levana’s
Story in with the main Lunar
Chronicles series (Cinder, Scarlet, Cress and Winter) when it
comes to how you would rank each of the books from your favorite book in the
series to your least favorite book in the series, Winter would be my second least favorite book in the series. While
there are quite a few things that I loved about this book, there are also a lot
of things about Winter that really
frustrated the hell out of me at times.
For
starters, the character Winter definitely ended up being my second least
favorite character in the series, behind Queen Levana. Don’t get me wrong, I
don’t outright hate the character Winter, but she really annoyed me quite a bit
throughout the book, and for the most part I just couldn’t get invested in the
relationship between Winter and Jacin, which is something I’ll discuss in more
detail later on in this review. When it comes to fictional characters that are
written as being mentally unstable, I’m definitely able to enjoy that kind of
character if they’re written in a way that’s genuinely compelling and
interesting if the writer is approaching it from a more serious angle. I can
also enjoy characters that are written as being mentally unstable if it’s done
more for the purposes of being entertaining and possibly somewhat comedic or
campy like soap operas will do sometimes. Kimberly Shaw from Melrose Place is a character that comes
to mind when it comes to writing characters that are supposed to be mentally
unstable this way.
While
Winter isn’t an altogether terrible character, she definitely annoyed me quite
a bit throughout the book, which is a shame, because I think that there are
aspects of the character that were pretty interesting and could have made her a
very compelling character if the writing for Winter had been handled
differently. Unfortunately, the way the character was written made the parts of
the book featuring her rather grating and eye roll inducing in my opinion.
That
being said, it’s honestly kind of hard for me to tell what exactly Marissa
Meyer was going for when it comes to the character Winter, and the way she’s
written. In some ways, Winter’s reluctance to use her lunar gift, and the way
she struggles with controlling the hallucinations that she has throughout the
book, because she refuses to use it reminded me a lot of Elsa from Frozen; and how she didn’t know how she could control her powers until the
end of the movie. The difference, however, is that I actually like Elsa,
whereas Winter just constantly annoyed me throughout the book. For the most
part, the parts of the book that featured Winter were honestly some of my absolute
least favorite parts of the book.
If
you’ve read my review for Scarlet,
you may recall that I was somewhat disappointed by the fact that the book had
more of an ensemble feel to it, rather than focusing primarily on Scarlet and
Wolf, with Cinder and Kai being featured in a reduced capacity. Admittedly, when
I read and reviewed Cress, I
came to realize that despite the fact that each book in the Lunar Chronicles series is named after a
different character, the series is ultimately an ensemble story, and I was able
to truly enjoy the series for what it is. That being said, as I was reading
this book, I constantly found myself thinking about how glad I was that the
series ended up being an ensemble story, instead of being the way that I had
originally been expecting it to be like since I’m not a big fan of the
character Winter, or the relationship between Winter and Jacin. I don’t think I
would have been able to enjoy this book very much at all if the plot of the
book had focused first and foremost on Winter and Jacin, and the relationship
between the two of them, with all of the other characters only being featured
in the book in a rather reduced capacity.
Don’t
get me wrong; I don’t absolutely hate the relationship between Winter and
Jacin. It’s just that I don’t think Marissa Meyer wrote their relationship in
such a way that I could truly root for a romantic relationship to develop
between the two of them. The idea of the them being romantically interested in
each other felt incredibly one-sided for the most part; with Winter having
romantic feelings for Jacin, while Jacin only seemed to think of Winter as
nothing more than a really good friend, at least until the end of the book. I
suppose that it could be argued that perhaps Jacin was romantically interested
in Winter all along, and the reason he dismissed the idea of having a romantic
relationship with Winter on multiple occasions was due to him having a very professional
and stoic demeanor; and not wanting to become romantically involved with Winter
when it’s his job to serve as her personal guard. Regardless, I just wasn’t
able to view Winter and Jacin as being a couple that I should care about.
That
being said, as I’ve said in other book reviews that I’ve written, one of the
biggest mistakes that I think a writer can make when it comes to writing a
romantic relationship between two characters is to write the relationship in
such a way that the reader is left wondering why they should even root for the
couple to either get together, or why they should root for the relationship to
work out in the end if they’re already a couple. When it comes to Winter and
Jacin’s relationship, I was just constantly left wondering why I should root
for Winter and Jacin to get together, since Winter seemed to be the only one
who was genuinely interested in them having a romantic relationship. If Jacin
was romantically interested in Winter, I’d say that it was so subtle that you
might not even be able to tell that he felt that way about her throughout the
book. It wasn’t until the end of the book when Marissa Meyer was doing final
wrap-up scenes for each of the couples that I was honestly able to tell for
sure that Jacin was interested in having a romantic relationship with Winter.
However, given the way their relationship had been written throughout the book,
and the fact that I didn’t really like Winter all that much as a character,
made it so that I didn’t really care whether or not they actually ended up with
each other.
One
of the biggest problems that I have with Winter
is that the overall pacing of the book was way too slow at times, causing
the story to really drag on and on and on unnecessarily, and it also didn’t
help that this is a very long book. While I’m not somebody who automatically
has a problem with some books being very long if the story itself doesn’t move
too slowly for the most part, and the majority of what happens in the book
feels like it serves an actual purpose to the plot of the book, rather than
being pointless filler; I feel like this book didn’t need to be 832 pages long,
though. Admittedly, aside from cutting down on for how much of the book the
characters are separated for at times, such as how Thorne and everybody else
had thought that Cress had been killed for a part of the book before they
discovered that she was still alive; I’m not entirely sure right off the top of
my head what are some other things that could have been cut from the final
version of the book completely, or at least condensed.
One
of the things that has made the Lunar
Chronicles such an enjoyable series to read is the interactions between
each of the couples and the characters in general. That’s why it was really
disappointing to have each of the couples and all of the characters be so
splintered off from each other for a large portion of the book as they were
trying to carry out their plan to overthrow Levana as the queen of Luna and
have Cinder take her place since she’s the true queen of Luna. Having a lot of
the characters, especially each of the couples, be separated from each other
for large portions of the book ultimately caused this book to lack a lot of the
magic that I felt the other books in the series had. It also didn’t help that
there were times in the book when the characters would be reunited with each other,
only to have them be separated again due to something that happened with the bad
guys, or they had to split up because their plans required them to. Despite the
fact that sometimes having the characters split up to carry out certain parts
of their plans did help move the story forward, it was still disappointing to
have all the characters be splintered off so much throughout the book.
Reading
this book ultimately led me to the conclusion that Cress and Thorne are
definitely my favorite couple in the series. Admittedly, they were the couple
that was probably separated from each other the least in this book. As I
continued reading the series after having read Cinder, I realized that out of all the couples in the series,
Cinder and Kai are pretty much the couple that spends the least amount of time
actually interacting with each other throughout the duration of the series.
While I’ve always enjoyed their relationship, the fact that Cinder and Kai
spend most of the series being separated from each other and not interacting,
reminded me a lot of Liam and Annie from the TV show 90210 and their relationship, since they were barely ever a couple
throughout 90210’s run. Despite the
fact that Liam and Annie were barely ever actually a couple throughout the
series, I couldn’t help but root for them to end up together, since I loved the
dynamic between the two of them whenever they did interact with each other.
Plus, I thought that Shenae Grimes (I recently discovered that she has
apparently gotten married since 90210
ended in May of 2013 and she actually goes by the name Shenae Grimes-Beech now)
and Matt Lanter had really great chemistry with each other, but I digress.
The
parts of the book that focus on Cress and Thorne, and their relationship with
each other were definitely the biggest highlight of the book for me personally,
because they’re definitely my favorite couple in the series. The book began
with several weeks having passed since Cress
(The book) ended. It was established that Thorne had taken the last of the eye
drops that Dr. Erland had concocted for him a couple weeks before the start of
the book, and there wasn’t any indication that his eyesight was returning.
However, Thorne’s eyesight does return relatively early on in the book, and
once that happens, it also seems to be when Thorne starts to reciprocate Cress’
romantic interest in him in any way; mainly by pretty much only looking at
Cress when they’re in a room together, and there are other women with them that
he ignores.
The
other relatively significant development for Cress and Thorne’s relationship
actually occurs during a conversation between Thorne and Kai where Kai tells
Thorne that he’s going to pardon him for the crimes that he’s committed, but he
wants Thorne to return the Rampion to its rightful owners, which Thorne wasn’t
happy about. While Thorne did steal the Rampion, I didn’t want him to be forced
to give up the ship either. Thorne and Kai also ended up talking about Cress,
and the idea of him and Cress having romantic feelings for each other. I’d say
that the conversation between Thorne and Kai definitely had a profound impact
on Thorne, because it was only after their conversation that he pretty much stopped
flirting with every woman around him, with the exception of Cress, like he had
been up until that point. It was pretty much only after Thorne’s conversation
with Kai that he started to only express being romantic interested in Cress.
Plus, there was also a moment where he suggested that they do something simply
because it was the right thing to do, and not for the reward money that was
involved. However, in classic Thorne fashion, he also pointed out that people
who do things simply because it’s the right thing to do and not for some
financial reward die poor and destitute, which I absolutely loved.
Cress
and Thorne’s interactions with each other in the book were definitely a lot of
fun, and they were definitely some of the best parts of the book, as far as I’m
concerned. Since their interactions were one of my favorite things about the
book, I was definitely the most upset about them being separated from each
other for a portion of the book where Thorne believed that Cress had been
killed when the group had been attacked at one point in the book, compared to
how I felt about the other couples being separated from each other for chunks
of the book. Thorne definitely had some really good character development in
this book, and as I said in the previous paragraph, I really think that what
Kai said to him during their conversation about trying to be a better person so
he could feel like he was worthy of being with Cress, along with his feelings
for her, inspired that change and growth in Thorne. I have to admit that I was
definitely worried, at least briefly, that Marissa Meyer had decided to quickly
and rather randomly chuck that character development for Thorne right out the
window, How I Met Your Mother style,
when he flirted with the two Lunar girls that expressed interest in him at the
party that he and Cress went to as a part of the group’s plans to defeat Queen
Levana. Fortunately, once the two girls left Thorne, Meyer managed to salvage his
character development by having him reveal to Cress that the two girls had
apparently used their Lunar glamor to make themselves look like Cress, so he
had thought that he had been flirting with Cress when he had actually been
flirting with them.
Honestly,
that raised a lot of questions for me, namely, why didn’t Thorne express any
confusion about seeing more than one of Cress at the same time? Perhaps part of
how the Lunars’ glamor tricks work is that it messes with a person’s head to
the point where they don’t question that kind of thing. Despite the lack of
explanation regarding that issue, the fact that Thorne believed that he had
been flirting with Cress and not the two Lunar girls did make me feel like
Meyer hadn’t managed to quickly ruin Thorne’s character development like I
would imagine the creators of How I Met
Your Mother doing if they had been the ones to write this book. However,
I’m also surprised that Cress didn’t question Thorne about whether or not he
should have been confused at the sight of more than one her.
While
I’ve always thought that Scarlet and Wolf’s relationship was kind of odd, I’ve
still always been a big fan of their relationship. Scarlet and Wolf’s
relationship definitely came across as being kind of unconventional in this
book due to people using labels such as “alpha” and “mate” to describe the
dynamics of their relationship. However, I’ve always thought that it was really
cute that despite Wolf having been surgically modified to be a street fighter,
he was still really sweet and tender when it came to his feelings for Scarlet
and how he treats her. I also really like how accepting Scarlet is of Wolf, and
the fact that he was modified and trained to be both a street fighter, and a part
of Levana’s army.
As
much as I dislike the fact that the characters were all splintered off from
each other throughout the book, I did kind of enjoy seeing how Wolf handled
being separated from Scarlet for the first part of the book, and in a weird
way, I thought it was kind of amusing that Wolf was annoying Cinder, because he
was anxious to be reunited with Scarlet. It was also great to see Meyer give
Wolf a little bit more character development by having him reunite with his
mother after not seeing her for many years at one point in the book. Personally,
I thought that the final wrap-up scene between Scarlet and Wolf towards the end
of the book was very fitting for their relationship. Scarlet told Wolf that she
wasn’t going to end things with him, and that they would make their
relationship work; even though he had received some more surgical modifications
at one point in the book, which might make certain things difficult for both
Wolf and their relationship.
Despite
the fact that Winter is definitely
full of action, since the characters spend a lot of the book working on
developing and carrying out their plans for everything that they need to do
(Form an uprising against Levana, overthrow Levana as the queen of Luna, have
Cinder take Levana’s place as the true queen of Luna, get the letumosis
antidote and start distributing it to everybody that needs it, etc.), and they
naturally ended up having to deal with unforeseen problems at times as they
were trying to carry out their plans; I really felt like the plot was moving
very slowly and dragging on too long at times as I was reading the book. Aside
from the book Some Luck by Jane
Smiley, I’ve never wanted to actually yell at a book and tell the plot to pick
up the pace like I did at times with Winter.
I actually ended up getting so frustrated with Some Luck as I was reading it, that I eventually decided to not
even bother finishing it in order to review it. Admittedly, there was a large chunk
of Winter where I had a very hard
time motivating myself to simply listen to the audiobook version of the book,
so I eventually decided to take a break from reading it for a couple days in
order to read the book The CEO’s
Unexpected Child by Andrea Laurence. If you’d like to read my review for
that book, you can read it here.
While
simply taking a break from reading Winter
for a few days didn’t immediately get me out of my reading slump with the book
when I started reading it again, the story did pick up enough for me to finish
reading the book without me feeling like I was having to simply power through it
soon after that. Don’t get me wrong, I still felt like the book was ultimately a
lot longer than it needed to be, but taking a break from reading Winter definitely helped me get back
into the book and interested in the story again.
For
the most part, I really enjoyed the wrap-up that Marissa Meyer provided for
each of the characters, with Kai helping Cinder adjust to her new role as the
leader of Luna and them discussing her decision to make Luna a republic.
Scarlet and Wolf decided that they would make their relationship work, even
though the enhancements that were made to Wolf in order to make him a more
effective fighter for Levana’s army might make that tricky for them. When it
comes to the resolution for each of the couples, I was definitely the happiest
about how the series ended for Cress and Thorne. Thorne got to keep the Rampion
after all, because he had set up a payment plan to buy it. He also got a
legitimate job where he would be helping to distribute the Letumosis antidote
around the world to the people who needed it. Thorne told Cress that he did all
of that because he wanted to become the kind of man who would be worthy of her.
He also asked her if she would come with him as he traveled around the world to
distribute the Letumosis antidote; which would give her a chance to finally see
the world, and she accepted.
Since
I’m not really a fan of the character Winter, and I never really bought Winter
and Jacin as being anything more than really good friends, I wasn’t really all
that invested in how the series ended for the two of them. To be fair, the
series does end with Jacin finally actively reciprocating Winter’s feelings, and
they apparently decide to begin a relationship; so the idea of them being
romantically interested in each other finally feels like it’s not completely
one-sided at the end of the book. Even after having read all of Winter and seeing how the series ended
for Winter and Jacin, I’m still not sold on their relationship, though.
When
it comes to my thoughts on the Lunar
Chronicles series as a whole, if I had to say what my favorite book in the
series is, it would definitely be Cress.
Cress and Thorne are definitely my favorite couple from the series, and I think
a big part of that is because Hook and Emma are my favorite couple on the TV
show Once Upon a Time. Thorne
honestly reminds me a lot of Hook in terms of the character development that he
undergoes throughout the Lunar Chronicles
series, and how that impacts his relationship with Cress all felt very reminiscent
of how the way Hook has acted towards Emma has definitely evolved throughout Once Upon a Time’s run.
Ultimately,
I think that Queen Levana is a rather disappointing villain, mainly because she
just comes across as being an incredibly one-dimensional character. No matter
how hard I tried to avoid comparing Levana to Regina from Once Upon a Time since they’re both the Evil Queen figure of their
respective series, I still found myself constantly thinking about how I think
Regina is a much more complex and interesting character than Levana is. Even
before Levana becomes full-on evil in Fairest:
Levana’s Story, she still came across as not being a very good person that
the reader could actually like or root for; whereas Regina does come across as
a good and sympathetic character in the episodes that explore the parts of her
backstory that take place before her mother killed the man that she loved and wanted
to marry, which is what caused her to snap and become the Evil Queen.
It’s
unfortunate that Queen Levana had bad things happen to her, mainly the fact
that her sister, Channary, treated her horribly and threw her into a fire when
they were children, scarring her face, which is the reason Levana refuses to
let anybody see her without her glamour. However, throughout the series,
including Fairest: Levana’s Story,
there’s never really any moment where she comes across as being a truly good or
selfless person. Sure, she loved Evret Hayle (Winter’s father), but she
ultimately acted rather selfishly when it came to her feelings for him and
their relationship. I don’t think that Levana’s supposed “love” for Evret can
be viewed as any kind of redeeming quality for Levana as a character. Levana
was pretty much just a horrible person, and a villain that subsequently lacked
any genuine depth and complexity, which led to her coming across as not being a
very compelling or interesting villain. Honestly, I think Queen Levana
ultimately ended up just being a rather boring villain throughout the series.
All
things considered, while I think that Marissa Meyer did a great job of
resolving all of the storylines and providing some great resolution for each of
the couples (Even though I’m still not sold on Winter and Jacin’s
relationship), Winter is still the
weakest book in the main series as far as I’m concerned. While I don’t
necessarily have a problem with books being really long in some cases, Winter is ultimately a lot longer than
it needed to be, in my opinion. Winter
definitely lacks a lot of the magic that
Cinder, Scarlet and Cress all have, mainly because a lot of
the characters are separated from each other for large portions of the book;
and the characters’ interactions with each other really is one of the things
that makes the Lunar Chronicles such
a great series. Despite the plot of Winter
having lots of action throughout the book, it still really dragged on too
slowly, which made reading this book feel like a real chore for me at times.
Honestly,
it makes me kind of sad that Winter (The
book) left me feeling so disappointed since it’s the last book in the series,
and I otherwise loved the Lunar
Chronicles series for the most part. However, I do still need to read and
review Stars Above, which I will
definitely do at some point. As for Winter,
there’s definitely still a lot to like about this book, despite its flaws. It’s
just that I feel like I was oftentimes more frustrated by this book than I was
enjoying it as I was reading it.
In
case anybody reading this review hasn’t already read my reviews for the other
books in the series, and you would like to read them, here are links to my
reviews for Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Fairest: Levana’s Story:
In
case anyone hasn’t read my reviews for Cinder,
Scarlet, Cress and Fairest: Levana’s
Story, here are my final scores for each
book in the series:
Cinder: 10 out of 10
Scarlet: 9 out of 10
Cress: 11 out of 10
Fairest: Levana’s Story: 3 out of 10
That
being said, my final score for Winter is
6 out of 10, and my final score for the Lunar
Chronicles series as a whole, which I determined by averaging together my
scores for each of the books in the series (Fairest:
Levana’s Story included) is 7.8 out of 10.
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