Glitches

Glitches is a short story prequel to Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles, the young adult fairy tale science fiction series that began with the novel Cinder in 2012. The story takes the reader back several years before the events of Cinder, to the moment when the eleven year old Cinder first arrives in the household of her stepmother Adri after the recent death of her stepfather Garan. Garan had been the engineer who adopted the young cyborg Cinder under circumstances that the larger series only slowly clarifies, and the household Cinder inherits in the aftermath of his death is considerably less welcoming than the home she had briefly known with him.

The story follows Cinder through her first weeks in the new household. Adri’s resentment of the cyborg girl she had not wanted to take in. Pearl, Adri’s older daughter, who has decided to dislike Cinder on principle. And Peony, the younger daughter who is the only person in the household actually interested in being Cinder’s friend. The story renders these early dynamics with the kind of careful character work that Marissa Meyer brings to her wider Lunar Chronicles series, and the relationships established here pay off across the rest of the series in ways that reward readers who have read Glitches before or after the main novels.

For longtime Lunar Chronicles fans, Glitches is essential supplementary reading. The story illuminates corners of Cinder’s history that the main novels could not fully develop, and the slow building reveal of how Cinder ended up in Adri’s household has the kind of emotional weight that the central character of the series carries through her four book arc. For new readers, Glitches works as a low commitment introduction to Meyer’s voice and to the wider Lunar Chronicles world. The story can be read before Cinder as a kind of preview or after as supplementary background.

Marissa Meyer has written several short stories and novellas that connect to the wider Lunar Chronicles, including Glitches, The Queen’s Army, Carswell’s Guide to Being Lucky, The Little Android, and others. The connected short fiction was eventually collected in Stars Above, the supplementary volume that Lunar Chronicles fans will want for their permanent shelves.