Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2) in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Dec 15, 2012 Nadine in NY Jones rated it really liked it

Shelves: dystopian-and-post-apocalyptic, young-adult, stayed-up-way-too-late, based-on-a-folk-tale, retelling-a-classic, cyberpunk, sf-romance

Two pages in, and we've got a character named Scarlet, who has filed a missing persons report with the police for her missing grandmother ... and you just know the wolf hybrids had something to do with it. By page 26, we learn that Scarlet wears a red hoodie. By page 28, we are introduced to a handsome, broody young street fighter named Wolf (no doubt a wolf hybrid soldier from the moon queen's army, I am guessing) . How clever is that???

FAIR WARNING: if you are reading this, when you start Chap Two pages in, and we've got a character named Scarlet, who has filed a missing persons report with the police for her missing grandmother ... and you just know the wolf hybrids had something to do with it. By page 26, we learn that Scarlet wears a red hoodie. By page 28, we are introduced to a handsome, broody young street fighter named Wolf (no doubt a wolf hybrid soldier from the moon queen's army, I am guessing) . How clever is that???

FAIR WARNING: if you are reading this, when you start Chapter 35, make sure you have plenty of time to finish the rest of the book, because you will NOT want to put it down at that point.

I enjoyed Scarlet even more than Cinder, probably because I knew what to expect. I also think it helped that I read The Queen's Army, it made me much more sympathetic to Wolf than I would have been otherwise. While obviously this story is riffing on the old Red Riding Hood tale (view spoiler), at times (at many times) I thought it was a lot more akin to Beauty and the Beast. I suppose in a way Meyer has merged the two tales - I wish she had remained true to just one or the other, it would have felt more powerful, I think.

The story switches back and forth between Cinder, busy escaping from basically every single police force on Earth AND the moon (along with her accidental side-kick, "Captain" Thorne, who was imprisoned for stealing an American spaceship, and who somehow manages to never become annoying), and Scarlet, who is traveling with HER accidental sidekick, Wolf, on a quest to find and rescue her grandmother. I DID sometimes get a little disoriented, and I'd have to take a moment to remember "wait, which one is Cinder? which one is Scarlet?" because the characters are awfully similar. Sometimes I would find myself wondering why Scarlet didn't just use her cyborg hand to do something, and I would have to remind myself that CINDER is the cyborg, Scarlet is the French country girl cum pilot. If only Meyer had managed to differentiate the two a bit better, I'd be giving this book 5 stars.

I'm looking forward to Cress (that's the Queen's computer programmer who's been communicating with Cinder, right?) which is said to feature Rapunzel (Queen's programmer trapped in a tower???) in 2014. ...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Christina rated it it was ok

Shelves: fairy-tales, sci-fi

Oh wow. Wow. Oh, there was so much wrong with this book.
Before I get to the book, though, I would just like to point out that mine is clearly the minority opinion. The review page is full of loves for this book, and especially for Wolf. "Wolf I love Wolf Wolf is the BEST!" seems to be the typical sentiment. "I want a REAL one!" said one review.
No. I'm sorry, but no. And I say this as someone who could happily make a list of favorite fictional crushes, many of them from YA books I read as an act Oh wow. Wow. Oh, there was so much wrong with this book.
Before I get to the book, though, I would just like to point out that mine is clearly the minority opinion. The review page is full of loves for this book, and especially for Wolf. "Wolf I love Wolf Wolf is the BEST!" seems to be the typical sentiment. "I want a REAL one!" said one review.
No. I'm sorry, but no. And I say this as someone who could happily make a list of favorite fictional crushes, many of them from YA books I read as an actual teenager (Hi, Eliar! Karvonen, how ARE you today?) and some from YA books I discovered more recently (Howl, call me!). The first sentiment can be filed under bad taste, because Wolf has the charisma of a snail, but the second one is just wrong. Really? You want someone who (view spoiler) No. Just, no.
Okay, back to the book. Characters first: much worse than last time. Scarlet was a purely reactive character for most of it, prone to a lot of exclamation points and occasional fits of violence. Even in the beginning, a lot of her dialogue struck me as very Lucasian. Lucasesque. You know, like George Lucas might have written it. Everytime she yelled about her grandmother, I couldn't help thinking of Luke Skywalker wailing "No! That's not true! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back." Scarlet, do us all a favor and calm down.
Also, who is Scarlet when she's not reacting? Did she have any goals in life before "find Grandma" became one of them? Any interests at all? FRIENDS (other than the barmaid at the beginning, with whom she didn't seem terribly close)? Um, why does she carry a gun hidden under her red hoodie, other than to seem cool to people who will enjoy a competent and deadly Little Red Riding Hood? This all remained a mystery.
Wolf, well, I already touched on that a bit, but he's not very well-developed either. I hate to beat the phrase "Makes Peeta Mellark look like Mr. Darcy" to death, but...He wasn't interesting at all. Part of it was the writing, though: his every action and line had at least one adverb attached, with plenty of adjectives sprinkled throughout. He was overdescribed but underdeveloped, which is not a good combination.
And Carswell Thorne, well, he read like the author just plugged in a generic template for "wisecracking thief character". Normally I love those guys, but only when they're well done. Thorne didn't add anything.
Don't even get me started on the villains. Their dialogue was just TERRIBLE. It was worse than Lucasian. It was Ed Woodsian. Their dialogue was the kind that is normally (and rightly) mocked by a guy and two robots. I would also like to point out that the chief villain's name is Levana. Think about how much that sounds like "Laverne," and then tell me she's scary.
I noticed that even people who liked the book found that the romance kind of came out of nowhere and that (view spoiler) To that I can only add, amen.
Plot and setting - hey, they were not good, either! Setting was one of the strengths of "Cinder". I felt I could always clearly picture what the futuristic city looked like. Future France, though? No clue.
I also have to point out that apparently future Earth is governed by a bunch of idiots. So they know there are scary, mind-controlling people in the sky and those scary people are governed by a megalomaniac, and they don't make ANY plans for what to do if the scary people attack? And don't even get me started on the supposedly noble way (view spoiler)
There were a few good things about this book. Cinder was number one. In spite of spending much of the book in an existential crisis, she's a likeable, interesting, competent heroine. And there were a couple of clever ways that the author worked in the plot of the original fairy tale, mostly the "my, Grandma, what big teeth you have"-type scene. The very end (although I had to skim some of the gory stuff - and that's just for personal reasons right now) was actually sort of promising. It was just that everything that came before it was lacking. ...more

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Feb 16, 2014 Lindsey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2014-reads

Amazing book and series. I adored Wolf and Scarlet. Can't get enough of this series. ...more

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Feb 08, 2017 Jaime rated it liked it

Shelves: read-2016, ya-science-fiction

I picked this up rather quickly after finishing Cinder, because I enjoyed Cinder so much. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Scarlet was as strong of a story.

I think the main thing Scarlet has going against it is that there are two focuses to the story. First, you have the further adventures of Cinder and Kai, moving the overarching plot forward. Second, you have the new story, centered around Scarlet and Wolf (as in Little Red Riding Hood).

Scarlet is a farmer who lives with her grandmother in the Fr ...more

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Nov 15, 2013 Genesis Hansen rated it liked it

Like this one a little better than the first - say 3.5 stars.

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May 07, 2012 Hannah added it

Shelves: scifi, myth-fairytale-folklore, ya

This was great. Really. I basically read it in one day. It's a great series, and this didn't fall into that trap of a waste of time middle book to set the stage for the last one (though this has two more coming, not one).

The thing I don't understand is how Meyer went from good writing in the first book to unlearning what commas do in this one. There was never more than one clean page before there was a missing or misused comma. I wanted to die. ...more

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