Review - 'Cress' by Marissa Meyer

Cress is the third book in the Lunar Chronicles, this time giving us a retelling of the classic fairy tale "Rapunzel". Our heroine, Cress, has been locked up alone in a satellite for seven years doing the evil queen's bidding with her genius hacking skills. This book also picks up right where the previous one left off, so we see all the story lines merge together when the crew from the first two books attempt a daring rescue of Cress, only to have things go horribly awry.

This book is so fun and entertaining! The action starts immediately, and doesn't stop for the whole book. Even though we are going back and forth between many different people's perspectives (hence the ever-growing length of each subsequent book in the series), it doesn't slow down the momentum at all. I pretty much just inhaled this book without pause.

And everything that happens in this book has a purpose, with all the action building towards a coherent narrative, which is one of my favorite things about this series. There's no meandering around while the author tries to figure out where they are going plot-wise; there's no padding the book with filler to fluff out the pages. The plot comes across as clear, concise, and well-thought-out, so there's never a dull moment.

Cress is my favorite heroine so far. Even though she hasn't had interactions with people her entire life, and she's a little shy and fearful, she still comes across as likable and believable, which is a huge improvement over Cinder and Scarlet in their respective books. Unfortunately, we still get a little bit of Scarlet acting crazy and lashing out in this book, when it would be more prudent to just keep silent. And Cinder and Kai still have communication issues, dancing around each other hemming and hawing for pages on end when a straightforward sentence or two could have cleared up any misunderstandings. They try my patience, but thankfully there are only a few such scenes.

For me, this book has finally reached the potential that I feel it has been building towards all this time with the previous books. At this point, the story has gotten so good that it's just riveting! I can't wait to continue reading and find out how they ultimately lay the smack down on the evil queen, save the world, and get their happy endings (since these are fairy tales, after all).

Readaroo Rating 4 stars