#CBR6 Book 13: "Cress" by Marissa Meyer

Page count. 550 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

This is the third book in a series, and I would strongly recommend you don't start with this one. This review will contain minor spoilers for Cinder, the first book in the series and Scarlet, the second book, so if you've not read them, go read them first. This review will be here when you're done.

Crescent Moon, or Cress, as she'd prefer to be called, has spent the last seven years all alone on a satellite orbiting Earth, monitoring communications for the Lunar government and doing all sorts of tricksy things to make sure Lunar ships can travel undetected to the planet below. About once a month, her boss, Queen Levana's head thaumaturge (think scary psychic) Sybil comes with more supplies, and to check on whatever progress Cress has made. At the moment, Sybil wants her to locate the missing Lunar fugitive Linh Cinder and her accomplices, not realising that Cress and her hacking skills are in fact what's keeping the authorities from locating the spaceship they are on.

While once a loyal Lunar citizen, happy that despite being a shell (a Lunar who doesn't possess the ability to manipulate minds with glamour) she has been kept alive (because the law states they should be killed at birth), Cress has long been trying to subvert Queen Levana every chance she gets. She devours all she can find of Earthen culture and media, and sent the warning to Cinder that Levana was planning to kill Emperor Kai once they were married. Now she's hoping that Cinder will be able to rescue her from her prison on the satellite. She's researched everything she can find on the cyborg fugitive and her accomplices, even a lot that's not available through official channels. With her hacking skills, Cress can get any kind of written record, if she just works for long enough. She's especially taken with the handsome Captain Carswell Thorne, who claims to be a rogue and a scoundrel, yet Cress is convinced he's a good man, really.

So Cress is rescued, Cinder defeats the evil queen and it's all good, right? Not so much. This is the third and penultimate book in Meyer's Lunar Chronicles and it's clearly where some spanners have to be thrown in the works for our brave heroes and heroines. Cress and Thorne crash to Earth in the satellite, having to find their way to civilisation from the crash site in the Sahara desert, with Thorne blinded and Cress unaccustomed to anything outside her orbiting prison. Scarlet is taken prisoner and taken to Luna, tortured and interrogated by Levana's people, determined to find Cinder at any cost. Cinder, a frantic wolf and a rogue Lunar royal guard travel to darkest Africa to find Doctor Erland, who may be the only one who can help Cinder prepare to face the Queen, and stop her impending marriage to Emperor Kai.

This is the longest book in the series so far, and my favourite of the three. The main heroine this time around is poor, lonely and day-dreaming Cress, so obviously modelled on Rapunzel and so desperately infatuated with a man she's never met. To his credit, Thorne realises very quickly (even when blind) that Cress is sheltered and impressionable and does nothing to take advantage of her affection for him, even doing his very best to set the story straight about what she believes were noble and courageous deeds, but in reality were fairly selfish and sometimes foolhardy acts. Of course, through his continued interactions with Cress, getting her through the desert safely, risking his own comfort and safety for her, he may indeed end up the heroic ideal Cress has built up in her mind.

Cinder is getting desperate, and she's running out of time. She has decided that the best way to stop Levana is to interrupt the wedding ceremony and expose to the world what an evil fraud the Lunar Queen actually is. She travels to find Dr Erland in Africa, hoping that he will give her the tools she needs to set her plan in motion. Can she trust Jacin Clay, the royal guard who claims he'll help her take down Levana, if only the princess is kept safe?

Through Scarlet, we see more of the cruel and capricious nature of a lot of the Lunars, and she is not treated well in her captivity. She makes a possible friend in Clay's strange and possibly mad Princess Winter, though, who seems none too fond of her stepmother, and refuses to manipulate the minds of those around her with glamour.

I knew I was setting myself up for a long and frustrating wait for the fourth and final book in the series when I chose to read Cress as soon as it came out. These books are just getting better and better, with multiple protagonists, story lines and plots, all moving towards what will no doubt be a spectacular conclusion in Winter's book, out sometime in 2015. I can't wait to see how it all ends. Hopefully, like in the fairy stories the series is based on, they will all live happily ever after.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 150. "Zel" by Donna Jo Napoli

Page count: 227 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Zel lives in a remote cottage in the mountains with Mother. The only time she sees other people is twice a year, when they go to Market in the nearest town, quite some distance away. While Zel finds the people, bustle and excitement of town life exhilarating, Mother insists that they have everything that they need in their little home, and warns her daughter away from strangers. Yet Zel dreams of a different life, of some day having a husband and children and a home of her own. Just before her thirteenth birthday, she meets a beautiful young man with a spirited horse, and she can't seem to get him out of her mind.

Konrad, the young count, is also unable to forget the young girl he met in the marketplace, and who seemed to almost magically calm his horse. Even when his parents try to arrange suitable marriages for him with lovely young maidens, he refuses, riding around the countryside trying to find out where the mysterious Zel can be found.

Mother grows anxious and worried when Zel mentions the pretty young man, and claims that there are bad people out there who want to harm them. She takes Zel to an abandoned tower, a fair distance from even their remote cottage, and before Zel realises entirely what is going on, she is trapped high above ground, with no way of escaping, with Mother on the ground, saying she will keep the bad people away. Zel's hair starts growing at a furious rate, until she can pull Mother in and out of the tower with it. Lonely and distressed, the young girl dreams about the young man, and tries to while away the months and years of her imprisonment. She's fairly sure she's gone entirely mad, when one day there is a call for her to let down her hair, and count Konrad climbs in instead of Mother.

This is a short read, and an interesting retelling of the story of Rapunzel. Some of the chapters are narrated in third person, and show Zel and Konrad's point of views. The ones from Mother's POV are in first person, making her account the most personal of the three, and making the reader empathise more with her, even as she's the nominal villain of the story. The witch who forced a young couple to give away their child in return for the Rapunzel salad they had stolen from her garden, who locks the girl in a tall tower to keep her away from all others - Mother is more than this here. A frustrated and intelligent woman given a tempting choice, incredible power over all growing things in return for a soul she might not even believe she has, who finds herself barren and alone, willing to do anything to gain a child, and who loves that child so much that she's determined to do anything to keep her, even if it means making the girl possibly hate her. Mother can't bear to lose her beloved daughter, but when it becomes clear that she may have caused her more harm than good, she makes the ultimate sacrifice to ensure her daughter's eventual happiness.

#CBR5 Book 59. "Once Upon A Tower" by Eloisa James

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Gowan is 22-year-old Duke of Kinross, who works desperately to set aright the chaos left on his estate by his drunken mother (who abandoned the family and left him to care for an illegitimate half-sister) and his debauched and irresponsible father. Every waking moment of his day is rigorously scheduled, so that he can give the proper attention to castle, his finances and his estates. He wants a dependable and hard-working wife, and while he generally believes English ladies to be soft, spoiled and frivolous, he can't afford to limit himself if he wants to find a good lady to be his duchess.

When he meets the young Lady Edith during her debut ball, he's instantly smitten. Angelic and serene, she barely speaks during the dances they share, and Gowan decides to propose marriage to her before someone else can sweep his dream woman off her feet. Of course, Edie was so feverish during her social debut that she was barely able to stand up, let alone remember who she danced with and what impression she may have made. Hence, she finds herself betrothed to a man she's not even sure she would recognize in a crowd. Still, after some correspondence, and time spent together when neither is feverish, the two hit it off, and the marriage date is actually brought forward.

When I finished this book, I originally rated it 3 stars. I read the whole thing while travelling back from a wedding in England, so it's not like it took me a long time to get through. I found the drama between Gowan and Edie could have been so easily resolved. One of the benefits of being so far behind with my reviewing, however, is that the books stay in the back of my mind and the more I've thought about what I at first thought was a fairy throw-away plot, the better I've actually come to like the book.

Gowan is such a thing as a virgin romance hero (the only other virgin Duke I've ever come across in my many years of romance reading is in Courtney Milan's The Duchess War). He very much wants to be a considerate and attentive lover for his young wife, but let's just say he's ridiculously well endowed, and not as great with the foreplay as he could be. Hence intercourse turns out to be an excruciating experience for Edie, and she fakes orgasm (on the rather misguided advice of her stepmother) to make him finish faster. As the weeks go by, Edie becomes less and less interested in having sex with her husband, who feels more and more rejected, and this is the major dramatic complication that the two have to resolve in order to find their HEA.

While romances are becoming slightly more varied and realistic in the bedroom department (i.e. not always a heroine who never feels pain during the deflowering, and usually has an Earth shattering orgasm to boot), it's rare that you find a book where the sexual relations between the couple is quite as disastrous as it is in this book. It's only natural that two very inexperienced and nervous young people start out having bad sex - I'm pretty sure that it happens all the time. It's just not something that you tend to come across in romance novels.

I also liked that while for a lot of the book, I kept just wanting to shake both Gowan and Edie, and shout at them to just talk to each other, it's also very understandable that they don't. Gowan's parents were dreadful, and had an awful marriage. Edie's father loved her mother very much, but then remarried a much younger woman (she's more like an older, rather foolish sister to Edie than a mother figure) and now her father is insecure and doubts her fidelity, and Edie just desperately tries  to avoid confrontation at all costs. Even though she frequently knows that her stepmother's advice is not the greatest, she has no one else to turn to. The book also manages a very clever retelling of Rapunzel, complete with tower and everything. Because I've had time to time to mull the book over in my mind, I've changed my mind, and decided to give it four stars.