Cress by Marissa Meyer (review)

High above the plague-ravaged streets of New Beijing, sixteen-year-old Cress is imprisoned in a satellite where she observes on netscreens the events of Earth, with a specific focus on the rebel cyborg Cinder and her accomplices (from Cinder, BCCB 2/12, and Scarlet, BCCB 2/13), who are now on the run as enemies of the Lunar Queen. Cress has been tasked by the queen to pinpoint the group’s location, but the computer-savvy girl instead uses her hacking skills to direct Cinder’s rogue spaceship to her own satellite, thus orchestrating her own rescue. Unfortunately, her dreams of joining the rebels (and making Captain Thorne, Cinder’s pilot, fall in love with her) go terribly awry when one of the Queen’s mind-controlling lackeys shows up mid-rescue, sending the satellite that holds Cress and Thorne plummeting to the Earth. Meyer continues her mash-up of fairy tales and science fiction in this third installment of the Lunar Chronicles, this time focusing on Cress, the Rapunzel figure. The addition of a third heroine makes the plot occasionally unwieldy, with the narration taking time away from Cress’s story to follow both Cinder and Scarlet in their own endeavors. Still, the shifting focalization allows the world to continue to expand, solving some old puzzles and providing a few new ones, while also giving more depth to the characters. The male romantic leads, for example, become particularly fascinating as readers see them in their relationships to each of the women, as love interests, friends, and strangers. This is very much a middle-of-the-series book, dependent on knowledge from the previous books while amping up the stakes for subsequent volumes, but fans will be thoroughly engrossed—and suitably intrigued to continue the series when a new girl ready to play the Snow White role shows up in the final pages.