The fairy tale of Cinderella has been re-told dozens of times, if not hundreds. I’d be willing to bet not many of those versions have androids, hovercrafts, and the part of Cinderella being played by a cyborg in a future version of Beijing where cyborgs are social pariahs.
Marissa Meyer’s Cinder is a tale of princes and princesses and an evil queen, a mysterious plague, and interplanetary intrigue. It’s also a story about having to grow up way too fast, having to make impossible thankless decisions, trying to find your identity and a sense of your own worth no matter what everyone else thinks about you, and teenage romance. With cyborgs.
The original Cinderella had a rough time as an unwanted stepdaughter after her father dies, but it’s nothing compared to what Linh Cinder has to go through. Cinder has no memory of her life before she woke up in a hospital when she was eleven years old, and no idea why her stepfather adopted her shortly before succumbing to the letumosis plague. All she knows is that she was injured in a wreck that killed her parents, and that a nameless surgeon then replaced one foot and one hand, tinkered with her brain and body in ways yet to be explained, and turned her into a cyborg, part of the lowest rung of society.
It’s lucky that Cinder has skills with repairing androids – the only full-service mechanic in New Beijing’s weekly market in fact – because the money she brings in is the only thing that keeps her reluctant stepmother from “volunteering” her for medical experiments. Linh Adri hates being saddled with a cyborg for a stepdaughter, doing everything she can to make sure Cinder knows she’ll never be loved, never be considered a person. And as both a cyborg and Adri’s ward, Adri legally owns everything Cinder earns and even her mechanical limbs. Bad enough to have an evil stepmother who treats you like a slave; imagine having one who can confiscate pieces of you whenever she’s feeling particularly cruel.
A chance meeting with Kai, the crown prince (traveling in the market incognito, as princes do) makes Cinder dream for the first time about love and freedom, and maybe even dancing at the Annual Peace Festival, while at the same time making her even more determined to hide the fact that she’s a cyborg. No matter what her pet android Iko thinks, cyborgs don’t have grand romances, and they don’t get to go to the Ball. She’s just going to have to keep her distance from Prince Kai to make sure he never learns what she really is.
…so of course the letumosis plague strikes close to home, and then a mysteriously broken android and Cinder’s own cyborg upgrades drag her even further into the orbit of Prince Kai and his ongoing diplomatic struggles with the Lunars and their dangerous queen, Levana.
Prince Kai was one of the nice surprises in this book. He’s not the usual fairytale blank slate who sweeps in to save the heroine. He’s not even relegated to just the impossible love-interest. Kai is a major character, having to take over as Emperor way sooner than he’d ever thought possible, and he’s desperately trying to find a way to hold off an invasion by the Lunars – and just maybe find a cure to the plague that’s sweeping across the planet – all without resorting to the one demand that neither he nor his father were prepared to grant: marriage to Queen Levana. The fact that he’s very sweetly and genuinely attracted to the grease-smudged mechanic who’s fixing his personal android just makes things that much more complicated.
Meyers has created a complex world with a huge amount of potential, demonstrated by the fact that she’s since released three more books in the series, with the final installment due out in November. And of course I always love a good fairy-tale upgrade. But in between the sci-fi and the intrigue were some of the quieter moments of characters interacting with each other in a perfectly normal way that I enjoyed the most. This is Marissa Meyer’s debut novel, and a YA novel at that, so there’s an understandable amount of adverbs and overwrought emotions. That sort of thing is balanced out by the tentative flirting between Kai and Cinder, or Cinder’s dry sense of humor that’s her first response to the ridiculous, or (one of my favorite scenes) the chapter during a junkyard salvage trip, where Cinder’s opinionated android Iko and Peony (the stepsister who actually likes Cinder) are both fangirling about Prince Kai while Cinder talks around a flashlight held between her teeth all “Yeah yeah, point that light over there and hand me that ratchet, would you?”
This is only the first book in the series, so don’t expect a happily-ever-after quite yet. Cinder still has a long way to go, and she’s only going to be the tertiary character in the next book, Scarlet, but I’m already curious to see how Meyer will use her futuristic setting to tell the story of Red Riding Hood next.