A review by isabel_is_reading
Winter by Marissa Meyer

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

I actually was really excited for this book, and I like it (I think) when I first read it. To this day this book was so nostalgic to me. I think it’s good for what it is, but if it was a little more different I would have enjoyed it more.
Plot
My first problem is that this book is  long, but somehow it felt like the author didn’t satisfyingly deal with the things she included. This book is about 824 pages, and I was excited for this length. This is a fantasy series and giving it as much time to develop and tie up the finally is needed, but I found that I wish there was still so much going on. This series has so many main characters (8 in total) and they all are fighting in each page for attention and development, and they are so close to getting it, but they don’t. At least not how much as they deserve. The author (in my humble, unimportant opinion) should have spend just more time developing the characters. 

This book, and the conclusion, made me re-think whether or not this book is critiquing individual’s obsession with beauty or supporting it??? Now, this might be because I haven’t read this book in, *checks calendar and decides not to do math* years…but (from what I remember) this is how I would describe my problem, but I might be wrong. The end of the book makes it seem like Levana should be dethroned NOT because she has committed genocide, or tried and successfully killed thousands, if not millions of people through biowarfare, or her treatment of her family and the SA she commited against Kai….
Levana should be dethroned because she is ... a crusty. Wrinkly, ugly, deformed hag.  Like the entire series has given us deformed character and shown that beauty does not stop and end in physical experience, but i feel the choice to make levana deformed, and treat her badly bc of it, takes away from this message.  The main characters attack her lack of beauty and scars as if they are her main flaw. 

Sidenoy on Levana’s evil actions I thought that the amount of death in this book is..weird? Most of the violence felt ludicrous and I don’t think the pint was to say “war and death in general are senseless”, I just feel it was to make the stakes higher without doing any actual work. 
Also, this felt like levena was kidnapping people over and over -again. I got bored.
 
Characters 
  • Cinder- Cinder is absolutely the most well developed  character and I think it’s because she we see her in book one, and we stick with her until book two. I think Cinder’s insecurity were dealt with well (despite the fact the sociopolitical reason for cyborg prejudice doesn’t make sense to me). I also think her narrative is interesting, because no matter what this conflict would exist. She becomes her own and accepts herself. 
  • Kai- I like Kai, I was annoyed with him in all of the books and for the same reasons, but when I look past that he’s very lovable. Every single scene that he had with Lana was absolutely terrifying and I feel the author did put that character dynamic very well. I also think by the fourth book I started understanding kind more as he kind of just wants to immediately lower the pain of individuals, even if it isn’t good long-term because he’s thinking of it more like emotionally so my annoyance with him accepting Levana‘s marriage kind of makes sense when you look at it at that standpoint, however I still, think that was a dumb decision and it didn’t really help overall since he wasn’t really looking at it with the future future perspective but that is you know its own point. However, I do think that the author, adding the fact that Kai has been through sexual assault, but yet not dealing with it and almost kinda ignoring it was really a missed opportunity to shed light on these type of dynamics and also give awareness to male SA, especially in young adult fiction, which isn’t talk about that much. Kies mind is completely controlled. He’s forced into this marriage. He has moments of like rebellion, but in the end he’s still forced to be sexually intimate with someone who doesn’t want to be with and that’s just really gross and I think the author, if they decided to put that which I think would be really interesting and is very important she should’ve actually talked about it and actually had Kai realize it And grapple with it and like I don’t know maybe go through a small mental breakdown or have some point in which he realized that and like talked about it but it’s not really done and I feel like if you’re going to put that in there, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it and actually like  Talk about it. I feel like it was just put in there as like “oh this just happens like this is just a thing that happens because of the lunar and whatever” without actually giving it the space and the gravity that it deserves if that makes sense.
  • Scarlet- I didn’t like Scarlet and the book that was about her and I found her to be a very boring character. I guess she wasn’t really important I guess and she didn’t really do a lot. The author could’ve I don’t know done some thing about family and like explored stuff with her, but I don’t even know if she.
  • Wolf- I like Wolf’s story in this book. I like the exploration of his trauma caused by the government and I found his story to be better. I’m happy the exploration of his trauma made it easier for me to ignore the…alpha thing, especially with the romance. 
  • Winter- I think Winter needs more time to be developed. The focus on her mental health issues is important, espeacially for the audience and time this was written in, but I didn’t like the way it was dealt with. She was the ‘crazy’ character, which bothered me. I also think her connection to the Lunar people could have been better developed. I wanted winter to be more charismatic and more socially, and politically aware to be able to make a whole bunch of people like her and actually be a useful tool when it comes to this rebellion and like the politics of what is happening in this planet however it just kind of made it seem the author made it seem like the only reason why people liked her is because she’s just really pretty which I just don’t think works, especially I think of the series or at least a theme that I thought was going to be better was that you know Beauty doesn’t only have to do with looks and goes back to the point I had for plot. I found that this book almost made it so beautiful people are like better , especially when you have a deformed character like Levana Who is treated badly and insulted because someone winter was seen as beautiful, and despite the fact, she struggles with the fact she has a deformity and she has a scar and all that she is still more conventionally attractive than Levana and it’s treated as though it’s some thing that causes her to be more liked by the people of the Planet/I guess not planet, since it’s a moon, but you know what I mean. 
  • Jacin- I liked him, he’s fine. I enjoyed his motivations were show a and he stuck by them. 
  • Cress- I like the fact that Chris is a girl who has been through horrible things due to her government and this books she got to fight back against it, however I think it could’ve been done a lot more, especially with how much of a foundation there was especially in the third book which was like about her which I enjoyed the most, but I also have a soft spot for the Rapunzel character. 
  • Thorne- I love thorns. I think she’s very likable. I think he’s very funny. He has a very good sense of humor about him, and I really liked his way of looking at things and the fact that he actually does want to help people even though he kind of covers it up as it being his selfish gain. I like the fact he did an entire speech about wanting to be a better person. He’s great. He’s a fun guy. I like the like rogue, selfish, kinda not really selfish, funny, sarcastic guy, and yeah, he’s great. 
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