Winter by Marissa Meyer is the fourth and final book in The Lunar Chronicles. Princess Winter is loved and admired by the people of Luna, while Queen Levana is feared and adored via persuasion. Winter is kind and beautiful and more than a little crazy. Winter reuses to use her lunar gifts and would rather go mad than force anyone to do anything. Including her childhood friend and big time crush, Jason.
Winter hates Levana’s cruelty and knows that her step-mother would never approve of her love for Jason. And in proof, Levana gives Jason an ultimatum–kill Princess Winter or everyone you ever loved or known dies. Refusing to harm his princess Jason tricks Levana and smuggles Winter out of the palace where she meets Cinder and her unlikely crew of allies. Plans are in motion and Cinder and her crew are ready to bring Queen Levana down.
Will Cinder, Winter, Cress and Scarlet succeed in starting a revolution and ending Levana’s reign? At what cost? And will our heroines ever get their own happily ever afters?
Good lord this was long… like really, really long. And what’s worse, it could have ended about five or six times with a perfectly fine resolution but it just kept going. Grant it, I did listen to this book, I didn’t read it. Maybe if I had read it, I would have felt differently. This one just felt like a roller coaster. Every time you thought you were getting off, Meyer would pull you back up the tracks for another go. This is basically how it goes… conflict, build up, resolution, oh wait, I changed my mind, lull, conflict… You get the picture. There was just so much of this book that we didn’t need.
Did I love that everyone got their happily ever afters? Yes, yes I did. But I swear I was only in this series for Scarlet, Wolf, Cress and Thorne. They were really all I cared about by the end. Although, I did love Winter’s crazy. Meyer does crazy right.
I do, however, feel like the Snow White allusions in this one felt a bit forced. In the other books the fairy tales worked in an abstract sort of way but here they were blatant and obvious and a little eye-roll worthy.
Don’t get me wrong, this was a good series and there were aspects of it I really liked but there was a lot of fluff I didn’t feel we needed. I personally, do not think books have to get longer with every new addition to the series. A little, maybe but not double in size. <<mini rant.
Overall, I give this one a three because I just had to know how our couples ended up. The series as a whole only gets 3.5 from me.
That’s all for now!
-M-