Winter

Winter is the fourth and final book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles, the young adult fairy tale science fiction series that began with Cinder in 2012. The novel is the Snow White entry in the series, set primarily on the moon kingdom of Luna and bringing together the cast of the previous three novels for the climactic confrontation with Queen Levana that the entire series has been building toward.

Winter is the title character, Princess Winter Hayle Blackburn, the stepdaughter of Queen Levana and the legitimate heir to a particular Lunar branch of nobility. Winter has refused for years to use her Lunar gift, the power to manipulate the perceptions of others through bioelectricity that all Lunars possess in varying degrees. The refusal has caused her gradual mental deterioration, with hallucinations and other psychological symptoms manifesting in ways that the wider Lunar court has dismissed as madness. Winter is also possibly the most beautiful person on Luna, even without using her glamour, and her marriage to a Lunar guard named Jacin Clay has been the subject of court politics for years.

The novel brings Winter together with Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and the wider rebel cast for the assault on Levana’s regime that the previous three novels had been setting up. Each of the four heroines gets significant page time, with Marissa Meyer balancing the multiple plot threads with practiced confidence. The Snow White material is reworked in ways that honor the source while pushing the science fiction elements of the wider Lunar Chronicles further than the earlier books had room for. The huntsman figure becomes Jacin, the wicked queen is fully Levana, the seven dwarves become the wolf hybrid soldiers and the various rebel allies, and the apple becomes a particular plot device involving the Lunar disease called letumosis.

Marissa Meyer takes the cumulative weight of the entire series and delivers the conclusion her readers have been waiting for. The fairy tale retelling tradition rewards a strong final book that brings all of the threads together, and Winter does this with the kind of sustained ambition that the YA genre does not always allow. The novel is the longest in the series at over eight hundred pages, and the length is earned by the cumulative emotional weight of the cast and the world that Meyer has been building.

For longtime Lunar Chronicles fans, Winter is essential. The conclusion the entire series has been pointing toward arrives in this volume, with the central confrontation, the various character arcs, and the romantic resolutions all paying off. For new readers, start with Cinder and read in order.