Cinder// A Review!

Was this book written in Tennessee? Because it's the only ten I see... ok, enough of that, please don't stop reading. We've found another one ladies and gentlemen, put this one in the hall of fame of books because oh man is this a doozy! Certainly it is deserving of an addition to my top books of all time section (check that out if you want to see a solid list of all tens)! Also, I am writing this quite a bit after I read it and I have read many books since finishing this one so my details might be a little splotched but I have reread certain parts to keep this review nice and reliable babyyyy!

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a retelling of the Cinderella story with a science fiction-y twist, and if you are a fellow rad reader you KNOW that sci-fi is the one true way to my heart, so you might understand why I love this book so much. If you are a sci-fi nerd like yours truly I can promise you, you will love this book.

Anyways, let us delve into the plot. This tale follows a girl named Cinder who is a cyborg, meaning that there are parts of her that aren't human, robotic. In this society cyborgs are looked down on and Cinder is no exception. In fact, her life is even worse perhaps, as she was adopted by a... you'll never believe it... evil mother. (The Cinderella vibes are so subtle but when they are there it is so fun and satisfying to notice!) Cinder, although cyborg, is the best technician in her kingdom and everyone is able to recognize it. That is how she makes money which is eventually all taken by her adoptive mother. Anyways, one day, a few days before the party at the castle in their kingdom, the prince comes to Cinder's shop to get his robot fixed. She fixes it for him and they form this sort of friendship, he asks her to attend the ball not knowing that she is a cyborg because she feels that if he knew he would want no part in her. Anyways, there is a plague going around, long story short the king dies and so does Cinder's sister. Cinder's mother blames her true daughter's death on Cinder but Cinder has no time to worry her mother because she is devastated by the loss of her sister and also focused on the fact that now that the king is dead the Prince must find a queen, a wife, and he is looking to the WORST possible option, the Lunar Queen who has been at war with the Earthens for as long as anyone in the story can remember. The lunars have a way of being able to control the minds of Earthens but because Cinder is a cyborg it doesn't work on her. She finds out some, capital S, SKETCHY things about Queen Levanna and thus madness ensues. It is a fascinating story where the relationships are just as interesting as the plot. It is tough to know who to root for but it truly is an awesome read.

Let's talk characters...

Cinder is an 11/10 easy. She is hilariously blunt and just so over her adoptive mother's antics and I love it. She is caring for her sister and the Prince but also tough. There is never a part where she is wallowing in self pity for herself after her sister's death, or her issues in getting to the Prince to share what she must to essentially save her world. She is great at her craft (mechanics) and she knows it, and she is not afraid of a mind controlling evil queen from the moon. That is 12/10 respectable. Her personality is an 8/10 and her decision making starts at a 9 and steeply declines to a 3.5 at the end, but it bodes well for a solid action sequence so I will withhold complaints.

The Prince is a really great character too. He is similar to the prince in The Selection series and once again if you are a dedicated rad reader you know that The Selection is absolutely one of my favorites of all time, so this is certainly a complimentary comparison. He prioritizes he duties to his country over his love life which is once again 11/10 respectable but also 13/10 annoying if you are looking at it through the eyes of Cinder or a reader who cares vehemently for characters (ME ME ME). I did like that it wasn't just a happy ever after and without the prince being portrayed as a strong character with his head on straight I feel like this book would lack a lot of substance, so yes, big fan of how this character was written and what he added to the story.

All in all, this was a wow-wow-wow greattttt book! From an exciting plot and genius writing to super duper funky characters that you really grow to care about and feel very passionately for (ex: Cinder's mother is quite possibly the worst parent of any YA book I have ever read ever and I will stand by that statement until further amendments are made on this blog). It is the total package and if you want something rad to read about I would absolutely read Cinder by Marissa Meyer. I certainly plan on finishing the rest of the Lunar Chronicles. I already bought the second book (Scarlet)!

Check this one out reader dudes,

- C8 :)

The Retribution of Mara Dyer// Book Talk!!!!!!!

OH. MY. GOSH. It happened. What you might be asking yourself? All of it. All of it happened and it all happened in this book and I am in shock. Pure genuine shock and I cannot believe it and I loved it all and you just absolutely need to read this book.

This is the third book in the Mara Dyer trilogy and if you have not read the first or second book I have two things to say to you: what have you been doing with your life, and READ IT RIGHT NOW! I am so so sorry rad readers, but I cannot give a spoiler free book talk for this book because so much needs to be said, but I think it goes without saying that I think you should read this. I gave it 5/5 stars on GoodReads and it was a crazy, emotional, high stakes read. Okay, without further ado, into the spoilers!!

Okay, I think I can speak for all of us rad readers when I say that I absolutely positively DESPISE Dr. Kells. I hated in the beginning how Mara was right back where she had just gotten out of, on a lab table with Dr. Kells over her. She was basically paralyzed but still able to think but she wasn't able to say what she actually wanted to, really only what Dr. Kells wanted to hear and I didn't know at first if that was just the powers of some crazy drug that she absolutely would use on Mara because she is a psychopath orrrrrrr if Dr. Kells had powers herself. I'm happy that we didn't find out that Kells had powers because that would just not be a good way to take the story in my opinion. I loved how scared Kells was of Mara as well; in the beginning, even though she had basically put Mara in a coma, she was still so scared of what she could do and Mara knew it, though it was funny, and loved it, and I loved how she loved it. It just goes a lot to show how dope Mara is that even when she is on literally every drug in the book Kells still doesn't think she's safe, and Mara still has it in her to mess with her.

"The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I was covered in blood. The second thing that I noticed was that this didn't bother me the way that it should have." (34.) I MEAN COMEEEEEE ONNNNNN! Is that not the coolest line you have ever read in a book???

Okay, Jude? I'm tired of him.

Hasn't he done enough damage? Like, we don't want you on our side anymore buddy! Not at all! Not even a little bit! Not even as a last resort! Even if you are trying to help Mara now, you are literally the reason she is in this mess so it would be best if you just went away! Big ups on him for almost killing Wayne though, granted Mara had to do the rest of it but I thought it was so fascinating how Mara just didn't care. She was just like "are you serious" and then... I still can't believe this... TOOK OUT HIS EYE to use for the retina scanner. I loved that she had no remorse for it. He tortured her so she had no problem doing it right back. What's fair is fair! This exact line from the book, I remember I was laying down, reading, unassuming, and then when I read that I literally sat up and just started clapping becuase it was SO CRAZY AND AWESOME. This line: "'You're not so bad are you?' Those were his last words before I cut his throat." YES MARA! DON'T LET ANYONE BE SO CONDESCENDING TOWARDS YOU! This book is insane, absolutely insane and the beginning was without a doubt my favorite part. Mara finally exacting all her revenge on all these people that screwed with her life so hard and made her look crazy for so long was so so so great and satisfying and gratifying to read about. When we finally got to Kells I was full on fist pumping the air. Never have I been so animated towards a book. Sure, The Mortal Instruments made me cry and so did Harry Potter but never before have I not been able to contain my fist pumping excitement and in this book did it to me.

When they had made it so far and then Kells got them again, I. Was. MAD. Kells got them right back where they were before with those stupid poisonous vents and honestly that is such a cop out but they should also be prepared for that kind of stuff by now. Regardless, Mara got the last laugh. The fact that Kells told her everything before she was about to kill Mara was just beyond stupid and also frustrating to hear about but also goes to show that she is just a bad evil villain and never stood a chance against Mara. She always had a back up plan to kill Mara just in case this all didn't work. She planned to just say that Mara went crazy, she built her record to say that she had a history that would diagnose well to some other mental illness. It was so infuriating hearing that she was just going to say that all these kids were killed by Mara. I hate that lady!! Anyways, Mara got the last laugh in the most ultimate fist pumping moment of the book, a quote that I will never forget due to the fact that for three books I hated Dr. Kells more than any other character in a book ever, well, perhaps not Voldemort... I digress. That moment of fist pumping hype would be when Kells was just about to kill Mara and thennn Mara hits us with: "Either Dr. Kells didn't know about it or she'd forgotten about it [the scalpel], becuase she was very surprised when I stabbed her in the neck." INSANITY. Michelle Hodkin is a god at writing and delivery and that is a fact not an opinion. I literally read that line over and over again becuase it was so crazy. We NEVER saw that coming and it was delivered so casually it really took the reader by MAJOR surprise. I loved it and was freaking out and okay, I'm done with going into super specific detail about this, but the begining of this book just needed some really solid discussion and analysis of Hodkin's geniuses becuase it was so good. Okay, I'm done now :)

Right away after the insanity and wickedness of the beginning we start to gather information about Jamie, Mara, Stella, and Noah. Still, we don't know if he is dead or not but I mean come on we all knew Hodkin would never kill off our golden character. I enjoyed learning about Jamie and Stella more, how their powers manifested and their back stories. I also really liked Stella a lot. She is a lot different than Mara and it is interesting to see how other people reacted to essentially the exact same thing that Mara went through.

Mara was totally losing it. She has gone totallyyyyy crazy and it is absolutely thrilling you have no idea what she is going to do and what is going to happen because of it. Thriller really is the perfect genre to describe the book. This is really just the definition of an unreliable narrator. She seriously started operating on herself... WHAT! Then she just disposes of the people that try to hurt her and her friends and she feels no remorse for it. It is --to a degree-- extremely awesome because so many times in novels like these you have characters that do something terrible to save themselves or their friends or their family and it is really the only choice they have, but they still feel awful about it. But Mara doesn't and I love that. She shouldn't. She has been through the ringer and she is also a psycho. She's the anti-hero but still the protagonist and also a little bit of a vigilante. I love it. I love all of it.

I wish we got to hear more from Noah. I don't think any of the readers were fooled into thinking that he was actually dead and he is such an exciting and interesting character and one of the reasons why I love this series so much so I was very bummed that we didn't get that much of him and then when we did get to see him he was hella confused and in a weird haze. I also found the flashbacks to grow a little boring and repetitive. I think it did add a bit to the story in that we got to know that this whole scheme was so much larger than just Mara and her friends, but still, as we went on and on and on with the genetic memory stuff I just stopped caring and wanted more action. Don't get me wrong though, certain parts were interesting and the backstory was important, I don't disagree with that.

The ending was absolutely wicked. I really was sitting there, freaking out becuase I thought Mara was going to die, then I though Noah was going to die, and this entire time I thought there was no hope for Daniel, that they just killed him and were messing with Mara to get something out of her, but thank go that wasn't the case.

This was the story of a freaking life time my dawgs. The ups and downs and lefts and rights and even perhaps upside downs you could say had be INVESTED. I do not know what I am going to do with my life now that I have finished this trilogy. Perhaps read it again and then again after that and then also again after that. Yes. That sounds like the perfect thing to do.

Okay Rad Readers, READ ON!!

- C8 ;)

The Evolution of Mara Dyer// Book Talk!!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have another absolute banger on our hands. Should we be surprised? Oh course not! This is Michelle Hodkin we're talking about! The sequel to The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer was just as good as the first and 100 times crazier and more twisted.

If you are reading this because you have just finished the first book and want to know if the other one is worth reading, the answer is yes, but BEWARE OF SPOILERS if you have not read this book yet. I gave The Evolution of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin 5/5 stars on GoodReads and if I could have given it six than I would have. I loved Mara and Noah and I loved all the spookiness!

Currently in the story, Mara knows what she can do, that she can kill people by just thinking about it, and she knows that Noah can heal people by just thinking about it. She knows that Jude is alive now and that her family thinks she's genuinely crazy after what happened in the police station. They think that the only way to reach her is through severe treatment but...

Mara is not crazy.

--I will stand by that statement till death no matter what happens in the third book, which I am so nervous for just for the record.--

However, since she is Mara and she is smarter, sneakier, and more cunning than these people could ever even begin to comprehend, she pretends to acknowledge that she's crazy after the building collapse, that way they think she is working with them.

She does this that way she won't have to go to an in patient center. She needs to make sure she doesn't get shipped off because she is on the hunt for answers about her powers, Jude, how Jude knows so much about her powers.

However, as things start going more and more wrong, it's harder to continue to pretend she's stable and Mara doesn't know if she actually is anymore. If she ever was? Noah is the only one that believes her, but Noah has his own issues and secrets as well.

There is a new level of uncertainty in this book which makes things just as exciting as the last. I couldn't stop reading it!!

Throughout this entire series the author does such a great job at evoking such passionate emotion from the reader. Right off the bat, literally, in the opening lines, I was fully invested in the story because it was so frustrating! The reader is always on Mara's side, I am always rooting for her, but her parents and her brother just don't believe her and it is sooooo annoying!! And then again, when she woke up in the hospital and they all thought that she tried to kill herself, I just wanted to scream IT WAS JUDE!!! I wish she would just tell Daniel straight up because he is a smart kid and he cares about her as his sister a lot clearly, so I really do think he would believe her.

Everything in this book is woven together so perfectly, from Mara's remembering her past and then even remembering what happened before she was even born! When we found out that all of this was basically written in fate to happen to her, I mean comeeeee onnnn, this is insane!!

I didn't see so much coming... especially the ending which literally left me with my mouth wide open in shock. I'm pretty sure I gasped in Starbucks while I was reading it...

They were test subjects!?!? Dr. Kells knew about their powers and was basically the evil genius master mind behind it all! I was shocked. It was like the opposite of the Snape reveal in The Deathly Hallows. I was blown away. I mean, don't get me wrong, I always hated Kells but I didn't realize or even consider that she could be behind all of this the entire time! The idea that the government wants to also see what their extent it, test on them and see what they can do it pretty cool. Not morally right or good for our characters but it takes the story in a crazy direction. Now everything is so much bigger. Before it was just a not so regular old mystery only really involving Mara and Noah, now they know that there are so many more like them. They have been manipulated the whole time and it is insane!! They have been letting Jude mess with Mara by sneaking into her house, her school, the asylum, even the freaking hospital to kill people, for this experiment. It is so much bigger than the reader could ever imagine and I never, ever, saw this coming and I love it. Where this series went right, the Maze Runner went wrong. In the Maze Runner it was so obvious that it was all an experiment but in this it was not at all!

What I also thought was so crazy about this was that when Daniel went in to talk to Mara about going into the inpatient center I seriously thought that she was going crazy. Again, another point like this was when she blacked out and did the creepy thing with the doll, I thought she also was the one who killed the cat and that is when I seriously started doubting her, but thank god I was wrong in the end. I thought that the book would take a turn and tell us that Mara actually is crazy. I never knew because we can only know what Mara knows and not even Mara knows the truth! It's nuts. There were so many points where I was like, okay, now I'm going to find out that Mara has just been crazy and hallucinating this whole time, and I mentally prepared myself to have my world shattered, but then my world shattered in a completely different way because of freaking Dr. Kells. I hate her by the way, but we already got into that...

Finally, as we go into the next book, the last line of this book, I refuse to fool me.

"Noah Shaw: Deceased."

ABSOLUTELY NOT. I will not believe this, and even if it is true I will still refuse to believe it. However, I am also scared that if it is true that I will not like the third book at all, because I fear that a Mara Dyer book would be seriously lacking without Noah's character. He adds so much to the series! I am seriously going to cry if this is one of those books where all the characters you love die... But, those really aren't serious concerns of mine because I just don't believe that someone who has the ability to heal himself and anyone else around him would die in a building collapse. An entire chapter (or more) in this book covered how Mara wouldn't be able to kill him because he is basically invincible, so I'm not buying it, Dr. Kells.

With this whole story line with Mara having visions of her grandmother and the Professor and the doll and the pennant... ya, that is all absolutely insane. Like I said, this story is way more complex than I ever would have thought to be possible when I read the first book. I really did just think this would be another thriller book about teens with special powers, but it is so much bigger than that. This book time and time again one ups itself and I am loving ever single part of it. Is her grandma really dead? Why did she kill herself three days after Mara was born? SO MANY QUESTIONS! This book is so much creepier than the first, with her really teetering between sanity and insanity, and then when she gets to Horizons, and Pheobe is just so wack, and oh my gosh Jamie has powers too!

This book was so insane and so well written and I have seriously no clue what is going to happen next. They can so easily convince everyone that Mara is crazy but she isn't crazy but I am losing hope in all the people that surround Mara because she is just getting screwed over and over again. I seriously can't wait to read the next one!

I loved this book and you probably will too, so give it a read!

Stay super rad, readers,

- C8 ;)