Scarlet - a review, or Little Red Riding in the Hood

Scarlet (Lunar Chronicles, Book #2)
Marissa Meyer
464 pages

(This review is spoiler free, which, you know, is hard to do).

I fell down a hill yesterday because a girl smiled at me. I mean, like, smiled smiled at me. I scraped up the whole right side of my arm and bruised my butt. The aftermath of the fall resulted in cursing and hissing and the girl quickly walking away from me. I was also on the phone with my sister.

She heard everything. I apparently said "Fucking boat shoes." Then I thought about
. Cinder who--in the last book--snapped her foot off, which leads to her incarceration in prison, and the new Emperor Kai keeping the cyborg girl's foot in his desk (clearly something is afoot with his feelings).*

Smile Girl and Cinder have two things in common: both of them walked away quickly from an out-of-control situation, and both of them made a guy swoon. Like, a hard swoon. Scarlet does not have these attributes. Scarlet would have stopped and helped me (alright, she would've laughed at me, or would have pushed me back down). She is, after all, on a quest to find her grandmother.

There's also a guy named Wolf who may or may not be a bad guy, and Cinder, and Iko, and the newly crowned Prince Kai; everyone is back. Even the evil step mother, the evil Moon Queen, the evil robots...

Scarlet is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinder a retelling of Cinderella; except these two heroines don't lose shoes or get trailed by wolves; they lose feet and team up with wolves.

I'm starting to think Marissa Meyer got too tipsy on wine one weekend and had a Sailor Moon marathon followed by a watching of The Tenth Kingdom.** There are so many different elements at play, so many things I could reference, so many good science fiction-y moments, that I had trouble keeping up. (There's even a few Heart of Gold moments a la The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

What Scarlet is is a much more put together story--a more broader look at the world of Cinder--than the first book of the Lunar Chronicles.

Every once in a while I give a series a second chance, a pardon. Looking back Cinder wasn't a terrible novel; it just didn't jive with me. Looking at Cinder after reading Scarlet? I'm prepared to give a HOGIB pardon to Marissa Meyer. She actually pulled off a rebound.

Well done.

Four Out of Five Fucks Given

(full disclosure: I bought--and read this--on my Kindle).

*This is a pun.
**Go suck an elf if you haven't seen this one.
Edit: Yes, I really fell down.