Mini Review | Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles #2) by Marissa Meyer

Format: Paperback

Read: July 2023

Book two was where I really started to get excited about this series. So often these YA series have a good first book and then a huge drop off in quality, that’s not true with these – each books uses the previous one for a building block, and we introduce a new character entangled in Levena’s schemes, to eventually aid Cinder in her mission.

Scarlet (Red Riding Hood) lives in rural France and is looking for her missing Grandmother. She is a tough, brave young woman who suffers no nonsense and I really loved her. She makes a good balance to Cinder who, while she really begins to come into her own in this book (love her new go-go-gadget hand), is a more reserved and thoughtful character. I also like to imagine her speaking with a French accent.

Scarlet encounters Wolf (get it), a deserter from the evil Lunar Queen’s army of mutated soldiers. Jupiter Ascending had also come out in 2015 which meant Wolf is indelible in my mind as resembling Channing Tatum from that movie [1]. Yes, Wolf is described as having dark hair not blonde, but I can’t do anything about how my brain wants to see things.

Other new member of the crew is Carswell Throne – the young American man Cinder escapes from jail with and who provides the space ship they’ll use as their home for the rest of the series (I had to suspend some serious disbelief over how much he wasn’t meant to have done will still being, like, 19?). He’s a little much for me, you know that dashing rogue archetype where he uses over the top charm to hide his heart of gold, but I understand his place within a series like this!

I liked having a little gang start to form around our Cinder, and how the action and the stakes dramatically ramp up. The world gets a little more fleshed out (particularly regarding Cinder’s history) but I still don’t understand the relationship between Earth and Lunar.

The gaps in the world are why I can’t 5 stars these books – it was starting to bother me, now we have a spaceship in play – that space travel is not explained. They have space ships – are they only using them to go between Earth and the Moon? Can they travel elsewhere? Do they?!

[1] I really need to re-watch Jupiter Ascending. What a fucking BONKERS film. [back]