Well, this was the most overrated book I've read in some time.

The summary is beyond promising. I'm all for retellings of fairy tales, even more so when you toss it into a setting that's completely different from the source material. And I saw endless praise for this, so I at least needed to give it a shot.

If the fact that my reading history of it spanning from October 2016 to January 2019 isn't indicative of my feelings towards this book, then... well, I guess stick around for this review.

I was bored from the beginning. There was so much potential to dive into worldbuilding or themes of "what does it mean to be human" or anything... and we got nothing. There's a quick mention of New Beijing being a mix of cultures in the beginning and... that's it. I couldn't tell you what the city looked like. Or anything that actually made it feel like it was in East Asia. Hell, I found more random references that nodded towards Japanese culture than I did for Chinese. Yes, I get it, it's supposed to be a blend of cultures, but when the only "blending" I'm seeing is one culture over another, especially when said culture isn't even where the story takes place, it comes off more like lazy writing and research than anything deeper than that. Seriously, a ten-second Google search can do wonders.

Also wow, you really had to make Cinder the special snowflake and not let her be Asian. While surrounded by Asians. Cool. Real original.

And all the themes which make cyborgs interesting are absent throughout this story. Cyborgs are "lesser" in comparison to humans and we as readers are reminded that multiple times... but why? I found myself asking that for various topics. There's something to be said about a sense of mystery and not revealing everything at once, but things that seemed common knowledge to the characters was just never explained. The cyborgs, the Lunars... I get that it's a series and this will probably all get explained down the road, but wow, give us a clue maybe? The moon having some evil queen who brainwashes her people isn't enough for me to buy into all of that.

The characters were ok, I guess. I didn't love any of them, nor did I care for the canned, typical young adult romance. Cinder had her salty moments, which I loved. Her wicked stepmother was an amazing antagonist and you just wanted to smack her. Queen Levana belonged in a Saturday morning cartoon. Kai was... eh. Not memorable. Which seems to be par for the course. I did, however, enjoy the interactions with the characters. There was some solid writing whenever there were moments of introspection. But the characters on their own? Not so much.

And the story wasn't terrible, outside of the bare-bones (even that's putting it nicely) worldbuilding. It followed the tale of Cinderella though wasn't overly predictable. It was slow in the beginning, picked up a bit, got boring in the middle again, and since Queen Levana showed up, I wasn't able to put it down. And then everything at the ball happened and... wow, it didn't unravel the way I thought it did, which is good, but how it did unfold was borderline cringe-worthy. And then it slammed on the brakes and gave me serious mental whiplash with how abruptly it ends. Like really? That's where you stop? I'm all for cliffhangers, but with everything that happened in the last 5% of the book, that... didn't seem like the place to stop it. Though at least the one obvious plot point since the beginning was revealed before the book ended. That was like ripping off a bandage.

I doubt I'm going to read the rest of the series. I just don't care enough about the characters to get any more invested than I already am. The writing's good, but the structure of the story and world leaves little to be desired.