Thursday, November 17, 2016

Cinder – Best Fiction for YA (2013)


Meyer, M. (2012). Cinder. New York: Feiwel and Friends.

Cinder is a cyborg and a gifted mechanic.  She lives with her stepmother and two stepsisters, Peony and Pearl.  The city is fighting a deadly virus called letumosis for which there is no cure.  The prince, Kai, brings an android to Cinder to repair for reasons he doesn’t want to say.  As Peony contracts the deadly virus, Cinder is sent to be a test subject for a cure.  She is discovered to also be Lunar, a people who live on the moon, and the Queen wants her executed.  Cinder discovers her past and why some people want her dead and others want her alive.

Cinder is set in the future in New Beijing.  I would say it is based on Cinderella’s story loosely.  There are some similarities like sleeping in the coals, stepmother and stepsisters, and meeting the prince.   But because it is set in the future, the story is so different from the original and there are some things like the Queen wanting to kill her, which actually reminded me of Snow White. With the story being set in the future, androids and robots are on every corner (it seems) and Cinder being a cyborg, not only is this book fantasy, but it falls squarely in the genre of science fiction.   This would be great for middle school and also for literature circles with themes of acceptance, discrimination, or social classes.    


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