Title:  Winter
Author: Marissa Meyer
Publisher/Year: Feiwel & Friends 11/10/15
Length:  656 pages
Series:  Lunar Chronicles #4

Overview

Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend–the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters? Fans will not want to miss this thrilling conclusion to Marissa Meyer’s national bestselling Lunar Chronicles series.

My Thoughts

It took me a while to get through this finale since it was soooo long, but i think that Ms Meyer did a great job in bringing everything together in a way that was really jam packed with excitement, tension and confusion.

Where we are left off from the last installment is that they are on their way to Luna with the plan for Cinder/Princess Selene to take over reign of Luna from Levana, and hopefully free the citizens of Luna from her manipulations.  Unfortunately, it’s never that easy, and we know that anything that can possible go wrong will.

Kai has decided to go through with the wedding to Levana in the hopes that it’ll not just give Cinder the time needed to get some troops and stage her rebellion but also hopefully to get the antidote to Letumosis to save all the people on Earth.  Of course, their plans get messed up along the way, Cinder gets captured, escapes, gets captured again, and practically dies a few times.

Then there are Wolf and Scarlet, – we know that Scarlet was captured and put into Winter’s animal habitat, and well, she’s withering away – not knowing if she’s going to be saved.  Winter who’s still suffering from her own issues with not using her mind control continues to make Scarlet crazy, but some how becomes the one person that’s able to help her escape and hopefully find their friends to overthrow Levana.

Then there’s Winter and Jacin.  After Jacin is put on trial for helping the traitors, he’s almost killed, and then assigned to watch over Winter, as Levana knows that it’ll be the one thing that he can do to get close to Winter as he wants, and Winter wants, and then to also carry out the one thing that she wants – for Jacin to kill Winter so that she’s no longer a threat to her power.  If only things were that simple right?

Then there’s Thorne and Cress.  Thorne regains his eyesight slowly but surely, and Cress continues to be infatuated with him, but never quite sees the reciprocation that she’s hoping for from him.  That makes her a bit miserable, but yet she’s still will to sacrifice herself for all of them, especially Thorne since she’s the one that is able to hack all of the systems in on the planet to get the team to where they need to go to overthrow Levana, and hopefully get the other to safety.

I feel like there are so many setbacks, stacked one on top of another, that even the little wins that we see in each of the story lines don’t seem to make forward progress.  It’s not until the latter third of the story that we see any real motion taking shape, and i think that where the story goes from there is a good place.  They are forced to trust people that may never have been a consideration before, and then there is the scene in the throne room that makes everything go upside down.

Levana’s glamour has fallen and the people of Luna see her for what she is.  Then she’s forced Cinder to come to her, and in that time, she’s taken mind control over Thorne, who then has no way to stop himself from doing what she wants him to do.  Kill Cinder.

In this one scene, we see cinder stabbed through the heart, we see Thorne’s fingers shot off, we see Cress stabbed through the stomach, we have also seen Winter use her mind powers for the first time in 9 years to force Scarlet to kill someone, and we see Levana shot.

The question now becomes, who of all these folks will survive and who will not – and what will that mean to the outcome of this series -and the future of both Earth and Luna.  I don’t want to give anything up since i think that there are a bunch of surprises, but in those last moments for Levana and Cinder, we see Levana tell Cinder all about her mother and what kind of person she is and it makes you take up for Levana again, just like we did in her little novella.  You again get to see where she’s coming from with her position in life and makes you soften to her again.

All in all, it’s a really intense finale to a series of fairy tales woven together to make a futureistic story.  We get to see the snow white and wicked witch comparison come out with what Levana does to Winter, bringing it full circle again.  I’m a bit sad to see the story end, but i’m really please with how Ms. Meyer was able to keep it going for so long and with such a great dynamic that i guess i’m content.

On that note – MERRY CHRISTMAS for those of you who celebrate and have a happy Friday!