Fairest

by Marissa Meyer

Story summary: Levana, the lunar princess, is horribly disfigured, has to exert her powers constantly to cover it up, falls in love with an ineligible man, can't be queen because her cruel and shallow sister is the heir, and has an annoying niece to stop her from claiming the throne. Her life sucks, eh?
In the Lunar Chronicle series. See also Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and the upcoming Winter.

Why You Will Like This Book:

• Entertaining, despite who it has for the main character (basically the evil queen from Snow White--and not a version of her that was made into a sympathetic good guy, either).

And Why You Might Not:

• It's a very short book, and although well-written, probably mostly of interest to people who are already fans of the series.
• It's not exactly a happy book, and not fun and adventurey like the rest of the series.

Thoughts: I only really read this book to get more backstory on Winter and Jacin, the heroes of Winter, the last book in the Lunar Chronicles.* I suspect probably most people who read this book were probably already fans of the series, and I would really only recommend it to them anyway. I'm not sure if there's quite enough of it to warrant reading if you're not a fan.

Marissa Meyer is definitely a good writer, though. I am continually surprised by how enjoyable her books are. In this case, I expected this book to be much harder to get through, despite its size, since I was uninterested in the main character and events and only really wanted to read the Winter & Jacin bits. But I breezed through it. I, believe it or not, liked reading from Levana's point of view. Although it would be difficult to actually like her, I found her interesting, and sympathized with her horrible circumstances. It actually reminded me a bit of reading Till We Have Faces.**

Grade: 3 stars

* Some of my favourite books this year. So fun. I can't WAIT till Winter is released. (At the time of writing this, it's only four days away!!)

** Amazing book by C. S. Lewis. One of the best books I have read, I think. My comparison of this book to that is not meant to compare their quality, only that there was some similarities concerning the two main characters.