Cinder

Cinder is Marissa Meyer’s debut novel and the first book in The Lunar Chronicles, the young adult series that takes classic fairy tales and reimagines them in a science fiction future. The premise of the series is built around four eventual heroines, each of whom corresponds to a different fairy tale. Cinder is the Cinderella entry, set in the future city of New Beijing in a world recovering from war and currently being ravaged by a deadly plague called letumosis.

Linh Cinder is a teenage cyborg mechanic, the property of her stepmother Adri after her adoptive father’s death. She works in a small repair stall in the New Beijing market, looked down on by the humans around her because cyborgs are second class citizens in this society. When the handsome Prince Kai shows up at her stall with a broken android, Cinder is pulled into a chain of events involving the plague, an intricate political situation between Earth and the moon colony of Luna, and the slow unraveling of the truth about her own past. The story hits the major Cinderella beats. Stepmother, ball, prince, secret. But Marissa Meyer reworks each one in ways that keep the reader unsure of how the familiar story is going to turn out this time.

The world building in Cinder sets up the wider Lunar Chronicles, which would continue with Scarlet, Cress, and Winter, each book introducing a new heroine drawn from a different fairy tale. By the final book, the four protagonists join forces in a way that pays off the slow setup of the early novels. Cinder works as a standalone but really shines as the opening of a series that becomes one of the more inventive YA fantasy projects of its decade.

For readers who enjoy fairy tale retellings, science fiction with a romance core, or YA series that are willing to take their time building large casts and big stakes, The Lunar Chronicles is essential. Cinder is the door in.