Review: Winter by Marissa Meyer

Winter by Marissa Meyer
Published: November 10, 2015
Publisher: Feiwel and Friends
Pages: 824 (Hardcover)
Series: The Lunar Chronicles #4
Source: Bought
My Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend—the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters?

This series has always been surrounded by hype and for the most part I think it deserves it. It is unique, interesting, funny, and just fun to read. I remember I absolutely adored the first three books in the series and I don't ever regret picking up the book. However, I think the way I read Winter and the large gap between books may have caused me to be less invested in the story and to be more critical of it.

I think my one complaint throughout the series was that it was predictable. You can pretty much guess what's going to happen and there was never really any twists that had me shocked. If you can get past the predictability then you'd probably enjoy it, but if you're looking for something to wow you with twists and turns you never saw coming I would skip this series. 

As I said before I think the fact that it has basically been four years since I read the first book in this series caused me to forget why I originally liked the characters and why I was rooting for them. I think that taking so long to read the book too also might have had something to do with it because while I really love Cress and Thorne, I was kind of neutral about Cinder and the rest of the gang. But ven though I was kind of neutral about some of the characters I really enjoyed the intimate scenes between Cinder and Kai, as well as the ones with Scarlet and Wolf and of course I loved the ones with Cress and Thorne. Those passages were heartwarming, cute, and earned a smile or an internal aw.

While I liked some of the more romantic moments, this book tended to drag for me. It probably didn't help that since I'd been reading it for so long I kind of just wanted to finish so I'd get a little frustrated when they would get close to succeeding only to end up basically right back where they started. There was a fair amount of unnecessary events in the book that definitely could have been cut out to make it a bit more fast paced. By the end of it I was mostly like let's just get this thing with Levana over with. Also I kind of thought that their plan to just make Cinder queen wasn't really that great because she really had no idea how to be queen, but my issues with that thankfully got resolved. And what exactly are they planning on doing with the wolf soldiers? Especially if some of them don't want to stop fighting their war.

In the end though, this book was a satisfying conclusion to a series that I have really enjoyed. It's a fun read even though some of the stuff that happens throughout the series and in this book is the very opposite of fun, somehow I still don't think of it as a very serious book probably because of the humor and the romance.