Thursday, December 31, 2015






Distiller: Hikari Loftus
Star Rating: 4/5 Stars



Winter (Lunar Chronicles #5)
by Marissa Meyer
Feiwel & Friends (November 10, 2015)
832 pages



After TEN busy days, I finally finished this epic ending to one of my all-time favorite series.

It’s hard talking about the final book of a series, because everything you want to talk about will spoil something from the other books. So I’m going to do this as carefully as I can. 

I think it's important to note that reading Fairest is pretty crucial to understanding Winter. I have encountered a lot of people who didn't read Fairest before Winter and I think they missed much of the full experience and understanding. I wouldn't consider Fairest to be an optional novella. In this case, I'm strongly counting it as Book #4 in this series.

As for Winter, all loose ends were tied up in satisfying ways. I didn’t feel wanting for anything, which I think is the most important part of the end of any book or series. 

One of my favorite things about these fairytale retellings (Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, Fairest, Winter) is how much of the original tales Meyer clearly wove into them. (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Wicked Step Mother, Snow White) And somehow, even with much of the original stories in there, these managed to be something totally different and awesome. I thought the Snow White themes in Winter were done cleverly. (Did you catch the heart breaking 7 dwarf reference? 😔)

So much went down in the final 200 pages of this story. I was pretty surprised at what Meyer allowed to happen to key characters. It kept me wondering how things would end up for everyone until the final pages.

The evolution and conclusion of Cress’ story turned out to be my favorite, which I wasn’t expecting, since I went into this one personally more focused on other character developments.

Iko and Thorne really delivered on the comic relief. And are probably two of my most favorite characters from this series.

There was one MAJOR moment that, a few short paragraphs after it happened, the story moved on in a way that made it super anticlimactic and almost made me question why it happened at all. That plus having some big mixed feelings about how things turned out for Levana dropped this down a star from a full 5 stars for me. With how many things that happened in the last 200 pages and how some of it didn't seem to matter, it just seemed like there was a lot thrown in for shock value. Even still this was a great conclusion to an excellent series. One of my all-time favorites for sure. 

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