Scarlet – Review

After my long car ride today, I finally made it to finish the sequel of Marissa Meyer’s novel Cinder. And I have quite a few thoughts about it. And just to mention, as this is indeed a sequel, my review of Scarlet might contain spoilers.

After the annual ball and Cinder’s dramatic performance, she is now a prisoner at the New Beijing Prison and will be taken by Queen Levana to Luna any day now. While Queen Levana desperately wants to become Kai’s wife, Cinder is trying to escape out of prison. But even if she succeeds, she will now be the most wanted fugitive in the whole Commonwealth.

Far, far away in France, Scarlet’s grandmother disapeared and while everyone else believes her grandmother abandoned her, Scarlet strongly believes her grandmother was kidnapped. But why for? When meeting the strange street fighter “Wolf”, Scarlet senses he knows something about her grandmother’s disapearence. She must trust him now in order to save her grandmother – who’s trails also seem to lead her to Cinder…

I love Cinder’s story and I also liked this book, although there is one small thing to complain about:

In my opinion, the start was a bit slow, what might also be connected to Scarlet’s and Cinder’s point of view changes. Only after approximately 150 pages, the book was getting really interesting. 

The first few chapters basically mentioned Cinder breaking out and Scarlet searching for her grandmother and therefore getting to know Wolf. That was the cause of my slow reading: the first chapters didn’t really blow me away and therefore it was easy to lay the book down and do stuff for school.

But even though I am making this book seem terribly slow paced, the second half was actually really enjoyable! The plot really unrolled itself, with many twists  and turns I wouldn’t have expected! 

I also really enjoyed the characters, just like during the first book of the series: Cinder is just really funny in her ruff way, Iko is as hilarious as always and the new characters were a blast as well!

I could connect with Scarlet from page one, didn’t feel like her actions were too forced or her behavior annoying – because some characters tend to get annoying when searching for someone like getting paranoid and delusional – but Scarlet was the perfect combination between scared and strong willed.

I also really enjoyed the bad wolf character – surprisingly called Wolf. It was just really enjoyable to see another retelling of a fairytale and the best part was the difference in the story, just like in Cinder’s retelling. Wolf was not a real wolf, still had something to do with Scarlet’s grandmother and you never really knew his intentions – not referring to eating Scarlet, but his means being bad or good.

Captain Thorne, the inmate helping Cinder escape, was pure pleasure getting to know because of his fun charm and his comments. I don’t know how to explain this any different, the book just has to be read to understand this!

A little sad was Kai’s shortcoming in the story and the small relevance to the   outcome of the character’s actions! And then, when we finally got to read about Kai, the chapters were the most boring ones, in contrast to Scarlet’s and Cinder’s chapters!

That might mainly be about the fact, that while Scarlet and Cinder were out in the world/orbit fighting against Lunars and all those psychotic wolfs out there, Kai was always shown in his office, negotiating with the Lunar Queen or meeting with Cinder’s stepmother or giving a press conference! And while I don’t dislike chapters where the main action is talking, these few chapters weren’t that breathtaking!

All in all, despite the slow start, the second novel of this series by Marissa Meyer was very entertaining, contained many twists, turns and “Aaaaaaah” moments and is highly recommendable to everyone!