Winter by Marissa Meyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is epic.

I’d been not so patiently waiting on this book for a while. I absolutely love this series and it feels like every book has been better than the last. The story just seems to build and build and I have to admit I was desperate to know how it would all end.

This book doesn’t disappoint. It feels huge, as all of the threads and characters from the previous books come together to reach a final conclusion which I thought was almost perfect.

A heck of a lot happens in this the final in the lunar chronicles. We have the long awaited visit to Luna, capture, rescue, tragedies, victories, rebellion, huge battles and throughout it all stories of friendship and love.

The standard of writing is consistently good and while the book is a lot bigger than the previous ones in the series it’s so easy to read and the story is so exciting that I flew through it in a couple of days.

My main criticism however and the reason for the loss of a star was that at times I felt there was too much happening. The narrative jumps between different characters so I felt like there wasn’t enough time to connect to one part of the story before you were jumping somewhere else.

While new character Winter gets a decent part of the narrative at the start it wasn’t quite sufficient for me to get a proper sense of her and it wasn’t long before we were off to Cinder and the other characters.

I felt that Cinder got the bulk of the attention which probably makes sense as she is the central character of the series. Her character has developed a lot over the books as she’s started to accept who and what she is and she develops further in this story but it seemed to me that the other characters were side-lined and became a bit less rounded.

My favourite characters are Cress and Thorne. I love them both individually and together and there just wasn’t nearly enough of them. Cress with her social awkwardness and desperate crush on Thorne has always been the one I relate most to and Thorne is the one who has always made me laugh, the flirty, loveable rogue. What there is of them is great, (like when Thorne takes his shirt off and Cress loses all thought) but I wanted more.

I suppose though that with everything that had to be crammed in there just wasn’t room. This story is a lot more serious than some of the previous ones and deals with much bigger issues and themes. The biggest being what are you willing to do and sacrifice to achieve your goal.

As it is the last in the series there is a big finale (which I won’t spoil) and the author wraps everything up nicely. I have the feeling though that there is scope for a spin off. I really, really hope that it does materialise as there are certain characters I want to see more of (no prizes for guessing which ones).

Overall I definitely enjoyed it but didn’t quite love it.