Review: Cress by Marissa Meyer

Title: Cress
Author: Marissa Meyer
Series: The Lunar Chronicles, #3
Format: Paperback, owned
My rating: 4 / 5

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In this third book in the Lunar Chronicles, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, now with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they’re plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and her army.

Their best hope lies with Cress, a girl imprisoned on a satellite since childhood who's only ever had her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker. Unfortunately, she’s just received orders from Levana to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue of Cress goes awry, the group is separated. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a high price. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing prevent her marriage to Emperor Kai. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only hope the world has.

-- As seen on Goodreads

My Thoughts

To put this bluntly: I liked Cress, but… I preferred Scarlet. I read Cress when I was on holidays a few months ago and I don’t know if that had an unintentional influence on my overall lack of fangirling. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed it, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

What I Loved

The Characters: Oh my goodness, I LOVE the characters in this series. We get to know Cress and Thorne a lot more in this book, and they are simply adorable together. Their entire storyline was amazing, and I kind of wish the book was more focused on these two! And Iko! I’m so glad she had a bigger role to play in this part of the story.

World-Building and Fairy-tales: So far, we’ve had three fairy-tales – Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and now Rapunzel – blended together into the Lunar Chronicles world, and oh gosh, it’s FABULOUS! How Marissa Meyer manages to blend all these ideas and concepts together into an even greater and more vibrant world is simply stunning. She created an incredibly fascinating and detailed world in both Cress and Scarlet, and to see it grow and expand to seamlessly incorporate a new tale and characters, it’s amazing.

What Didn’t Work For Me

The Severe Lack of Scarlet and Wolf! This is my biggest complaint about Cress. In book two, I clicked with Scarlet straight away, and after reading the first couple of chapters I felt like I ‘got’ her. I was really looking forward to seeing both Scarlet and Wolf’s characters growing along with all the others in Cress, and to find that they have minimal page-time… I was extremely disappointed.

A little too much POV switching: I love that there is never a dull moment in the Lunar Chronicles series, and point-of-view switching between the main characters is a big reason for this. We have a lot of main characters and story lines to catch up with, but I didn’t feel the POV switching was a seamless in Cress in comparison to Scarlet. I loved Cress and Thorne’s story, and I wanted to be completely immersed in what was going on with them, but all of a sudden a chapter would end and we’d be transported to, for example, Kai’s POV. I’m one of the very few people that hasn’t completely clicked with Cinder or Kai, and I don’t really know why. I LIKE them; I just don’t FEEL anything toward them. So, when the story switched to a character I’m not AS invested in right in the middle of a crucial moment that a character I DO care about is in… it’s a tad frustrating! I couldn’t completely settle into one story line before it switched away to something else. I don’t remember having this problem in Scarlet – I remember the POV switches being so well timed and blending together perfectly, it was a strange surprise that I had a problem with them here.

Overall, I did really enjoy Cress. I loved seeing how Rapunzel was incorporated into an already extremely intricate Dystopian Sci-fi world. Both Cress and Thorne are fabulous characters, and I can’t wait to see more from them in Winter – hopefully with a lot more Scarlet and Wolf, too!