Title: Cinder

Author: Marissa Meyer

Year: 2012

Themes: ANDROID, POSTHUMAN, WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS

Critical Summary: The debut novel of science fiction and young adult novelist Marissa Meyer, Cinder is book one of The Lunar Chronicles, a YA series that sets out to subvert and reinvent the narratives of fairy tales. Cinder follows Linh Mei, a sixteen year old cyborg mechanic who lives in the city of New Beijing under the strict guardianship of her stepmother and stepsisters. She is the eponymous heroine of the novel, going by Cinder to those she meets, and her own story runs neatly parallel to the classic tale of Cinderella, with a distinctly sci-fi and dystopian twist.

Like many fairy tales, this story’s “once upon a time” begins with a lowborn servant girl meeting a handsome prince, except this lowborn servant girl is half-machine, half human, and closer in characterization to that of Frankenstein’s monster than to a fabled princess. As a cyborg, Cinder is treated as a second-class citizen by all and as a monster by many, being seen as an abomination rather than as a human being. Her status as a cyborg is complicated by her placement under the guardianship of her stepmother, Linh Adri, who deeply resents Cinder and forces the young cyborg to work as a mechanic to maintain the pampered lifestyle of Adri and her two daughters, Peony and Pearl. Cinder’s life, trapped as she is under the thumb of her hateful stepmother, changes for the better and the worse with the introduction of the charming Prince Kai, who, after innocuously contracting her to repair his android, inadvertently drags her into a dark conspiracy that spans the nations of the Earthen Union and the Kingdom of Luna. She is soon forced to contend with a barrage of reveals, from the true circumstances surrounding her creation as a cyborg to her lost heritage, which connects her not only to the fate of the world and to the prince she loves, but also to the cruel Lunar Queen, Levana, the tyrannical monarch of the moon.

Cinder is a novel that seamlessly knits together many staples of the science fiction genre, doing so in a way that preserves its body of inspiration, that being Cinderella, while being satisfyingly unique to the timeless classic. As a refreshing take on a tale that has been contemporaneously associated with a medieval European setting, Cinder is instead set in what may roughly be associated with our world’s Beijing, in a future that has been so heavily ravaged by war and discord that race and localized culture has all but lost its meaning. Cinder features cyborgs, androids, alien peoples, mind-controlling magic, sweeping plagues, wealth disparity, the utopic, dystopic, and conspiracy, which is all tied together by a subtle but deep-seated madness that threatens the foundation of the characters’ sanity and that of the world.

Administrative Notes: Emilee Gibbons