Review: Winter by Marissa Meyer

Winter is the fourth and final book in the Lunar Chronicles series. If you haven’t read the first three (Cinder, Scarlet and Cress), I highly recommend you do that first, as this contains major spoilers for that. However this review will be spoiler free for Winter.

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Publisher: Puffin Books
Release Date: November 12, 2015
Format: Paperback
ISBN:  9780141340241
Pages: 823
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Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend—the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters?

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I think it’s cruel to release a book when its title is seasonally inappropriate for folks in the southern hemisphere, because it just doesn’t work out as well, y’know. But what can you do about it really. It just doesn’t make sense when I yell out ‘WINTER IS FINALLY HERE!’ because a) it’s seasonally inappropriate and b) Game of Thrones fans just stare at me weirdly until I explain that I’m not making a GoT reference. I’m going completely off topic wow okay back to the point.

Winter picks up from the end of Cress, and my gosh, it was an emotional rollercoaster. So much happened in the 800 pages and at times, it was extremely frustrating to read, but I read it in like 3 sittings because I just needed to know what happened next.

The plot was constantly moving forward, with a few minor twists here and there. You can definitely tell what the elements of Snow White that were incorporated into the book were. (I actually don’t know the story of Snow White and I vaguely know what happens) There are still elements from the previous fairy tales that the last three books encompassed, which was clever.

There were many action scenes, intense battles (although I think they could’ve been more intense than they were) and also there were some scenes where I find it a little unrealistic that the characters made the choices that they did.

There wasn’t really much character development in this book, which is understandable since it was the conclusion to the series and focused more on the plot. There was separation of couples which made me anxious just reading about their different journeys, and also sweet reunions which made my heart go all fuzzy. However, despite the lack of character development, there is a lot of worldbuilding, especially about the moon/Luna. I think it’s pretty amazing that they managed to have life on the moon, let alone have an entire civilisation with its own monarchy and all. It still blows my mind, even after reading this book.

Although I don’t want this series to end, I loved how Marissa Meyer wrapped up the entire series by making it come full circle. All the characters have come so far from when we first met them, and I like how everyone had a mostly satisfactory ending, especially Cinder and Kai. I really want to find out what happens to the characters after Winter, but I believe there is an anthology of novellas being published next year that tells this story.

While Winter was amazing, I still think that Cress is my favourite out of the four books. There’s just this magical quality about Cress which still holds a place in my heart.

Rating: ★★★★.5