Author: Marissa Meyer
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WORTHY!
Erratum:
On page 89 Channery's drink is bright orange, yet on page 90 it’s poppy-colored? That doesn't mean orange to me.
This one felt to me like it was going to be one of those filler books written by authors of series, who’ve made extensive notes and didn’t want to waste them. Normally I will not read these, but I loved the first book, Cinder in this quadrilogy – which I guess is now a pentalogy. I found the next two, Scarlett, and Cress disappointing. I plan on reading the final one this fall, hoping it will be better. What I didn’t expect is how surprisingly good this was. It felt like I was back in volume one, reading a real and interesting story that made sense and had smart characters who did real things. It was not at all like the last two volumes were, and it was really quite unexpected. I am glad I took a chance on it.
The story takes off with Levana and her sister Channery “mourning” the death of their parents, although neither misses them. Levana is very spoiled, bratty and resentful. Channery, completely devoid of empathy or any sort of feeling, becomes queen, and Levana falls for the one of the palace guards. After his wife dies in childbirth, Levana uses mind-control on the guard to ‘force” him to love her, and then to force him to marry her.
The strange thing is that after three years or so, he doesn't exactly love her – but he has stayed with her. The problem is that no matter how much she gets, for Levana it's never enough, and her childhood was so rotten that she can never let down her guard, not even with her own husband. Levana has spent all her life learning to use her “glamor" to hide her true disfigured appearance from everyone, and even now she will not even trust her husband to see it.
When Channery unexpectedly dies, Levana is appointed regent until Channery’s own daughter, Selene, reaches age thirteen, when she will become queen, but Levana has other plans, and none of them involve giving-up the throne. Levana is pure evil, but the evil seems to be impulsive - so that after she's perpetrated it, she feels regret, but not enough regret to stop being evil!
This makes for a nice little story (only a couple of hundred pages), and it was a refreshing entertainment after the disappointments of the middle two children in the main quartet. I recommend it. It's taken a bit of the sour taste out of my mouth for the upcoming finale.
