Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

I am late posting my review of Scarlet by Marissa Meyer, I meant to have it done the day I read the book, the day it came out but I got distracted. Oops. Dang books and their addictivness.

I read Cinder by Marissa Meyer a few moons ago and have been not so patiently waiting Scarlet, the sequel. Actually, that has happened with a lot of books for me. I have them all marked on my calendar so I get reminders of when books I have been waiting for get released. It works well.

Anyways, I fell in love with the concept of Cinder, a cyborg Cinderella? It blends my love of scifi/fantasy and new takes on old fairy tales. Of course I wanted to read Scarlet by Marissa Meyer which continues on with the story of Cinderella and adds Little Red Riding Hood to the mix.

Sadly, I do have a negative thing to say about Scarlet. I got it in ebook format for my Nook app and I was very disappointed with the formatting. Instead of having the writing fill the page it was in column format and on my phone that ended up only having a few sentences per page. I had to make the font a smaller size than I usually prefer to fit more than a few sentences per page. It was rather annoying. But that was my only real complaint about the book.

In Scarlet we are introduced to Scarlet Benoit, granddaughter of Michelle Benoit. Michelle runs a farm in France with the help of Scarlet, but two weeks before the start of the book Michelle Benoit goes missing. The police have given up, assuming that it was a suicide or that Michelle Benoit simply ran off, leaving Scarlet to find her mother on her own. A few chapters in Scarlet meets Wolf, a street fighter with a mysterious past and an unusual tattoo. After Wolf protects Scarlet in a bar fight, she offers him a job on the farm. Several days later when her absentee father shows up at the farm looking for something that Michelle Benoit had hidden, Scarlet finds out that her grandmother has been kidnapped by the mysterious Order of the Pack, or the Wolves. When Scarlet learns about the Wolves, she goes to Wolf, who offers to help her find her grandmother.

At the same time all this is happening there is a second story, this one about Cinder. At the end of the first book, Cinder is locked in a jail after finding out that she isn't who she was raised to believe she is. Cinder contrives to escape from jail with the help of her new cyborg hand and a criminal she meets in another cell. Former Cadet Thorne, who now goes by Captain Thorne, is in jail for dereliction of duty, going awol and stealing an American Military spaceship. Cinder takes Captain Thorne with her after finding out he still has the ship in hiding. She and Thorne take off to avoid being recaptured and to find out more about her past.

I thought this was an excellent sequel and better than the first book. I liked Scarlet as a character and loved Iko, an android from the first book, being uploaded as the computer in Thorne's ship.

I would rate this a 3.5 out of 5. It got a lower rating because of the annoying formatting in the ebook format.

Recommendations:
Cinder by Marissa Meyers - To understand what is going on in the second book, you should really read the first book. Plus it's Cinderella meets cyborgs.

Princess series by Jessica Day George - a series of books that blends fairy tales together. The most recent book in the series is Princess of the Silver Woods, another version of Little Red Riding Hood.