Winter

The final book in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles was everything I wanted it to be and more. Not that I wanted much from it beyond everyone getting their happy ending. Which I fully expected to happen. It's a fairy tale, after all, and what good is a fairy tale if it doesn't end "happily ever after"? But it was the road to the happily ever after that really impressed me.

The book acknowledges what a difficult task it will be for a bunch of teenagers and young adults to overthrown a queen and end her tyrannical reign. It doesn't seek easy answers, though there are a fair number of happy coincidences. The book relies on the populace being ready for an uprising, and makes use of overwhelming numbers against the queen's mind control powers.

The ending was nicely realistic, too. Queen Selene neé Cinder doesn't have much experience running a nation, and it shows. She relies heavily on advisers, lays all her cards on the table in negotiations, and immediately makes plans to put people who actually know what they're doing in charge. All the couples end up together to the degree that they want to be together, and there's a promising future ahead of them that will undoubtedly be full of hard work.

I just had a couple of minor nitpicks with the book, which was a little rough in some places. I think it could have used one more pass by an editor to make some of the language flow a little better, and I imagine that this was skipped over in favor of getting it published while enthusiasm was still high. But it's minor and didn't really detract from my enjoyment of this wonderful, romantic, epic fairy tale.

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