Winter is the fourth and last installment in a dystopian series retelling fairy tales called The Lunar Chronicles…Marissa Meyer has published the whole series and a bunch of novellas from which I
haven’t read only the Stars Above. To see my reviews for other main installments click here.

These series are very popular among young adults and although I disliked the first book, I really enjoyed Scarlet and The Fairest, which is the reason why I finished the series without whining about things I didn’t like in the series. The world in The Lunar Chronicles is fairly unique and although there are plot holes, sometimes the story is so exciting that it makes you not notice them.

It is not possible to read this book without reading the previous installments. And although the author has made an attempt to remind or tell the reader what happened before, it is not enough to truly understand or enjoy it, if you haven’t had the connection with the heroes – haven’t read the whole series. It did help to recall what and how things happened in the previous books, yet I have to admit that some things I had forgotten and wasn’t reminded of, which was a pity.

The book continues to follow our main heroes through the quest to free both Earthens and Lunars from the evil queen. It introduces some new characters as well as develops the old ones and offers them new adventures, plotting and planing the impossible mission to overthrow Levana.

I didn’t love this book, I thought it was a fair conclusion, but it was far from the epic ending I was hoping to have. The first and last third of the book went on swiftly and easy, although by the end the writing seemed a little bit worse, maybe underedited or rushed. But the middle part was quite boring and it seemed like we could have lived without a few of those chapters.

My favorite character in this book was Storm and I was very sad that he was there for such a short time. I liked to toy with the idea of Storm, Scarlet and Wolf all together, but, I guess we would need a miracle and another book for that to happen.

I found Princess Winter too be too unrelatable to like. I didn’t feel attached to her and I saw a lot of space in Winter’s psychological state which the author could have explored to make the reader understand her better. I actually felt more connected to Rye than Winter and that says something about her character development. I wouldn’t have thought of all this underdeveloped character thing, if it wouldn’t have been for her scene with Aimery Park. I thought it was brilliant, emotional and painful, and I wish it would have had more foundation for it, because him just being an evil person is not making it personal enough for such an emotional experience.

I loved that scene and that will probably be the only reason why I will remember Winter. I think that the author could have included her a bit more in the previous books, so we would have had a chance to catch a glimpse of her and get a feel, otherwise I really only cared about the characters I have known for most of the series.

I also found it a bit difficult in imagining Winter with a dark skin colour. I think it was mentioned before (in Cress?) that she was pale and I based her in my imagination on Snow White (which is obviously correct), whose skin was pale as milk. And I guess I saw her skin sparkling like Edward Cullen… I mean diamond…  And it disturbed me a lot that it was emphasized so many times that Winter’s skin was brown. In my imagination Scarlet was a bit on the brown side and of course Kaito was Asian, yet I feel like only Winter’s skin colour was stressed.Why? And yes, I would have been totally fine with all this, if I wouldn’t have gotten the wrong image since the first proclamations of her being based on Snow White. And I don’t know why, but for some weird reason I thought that Lunars are sparkly.

The finale, as I mentioned before, wasn’t as epic as I had hoped. This book in the series brought me back to the reality and reminded that some of the reactions in it were not normal. But I got over it and was just sad that Princess Selena fell for Levana’s trick and I also was a little bit disappointed that there weren’t more of Levana’s tricks.

So overall it was a tiny bit of a disappointment, but then again, most part of the book was exciting and interesting. This book obviously should be read only by the people who have read the previous installments in the series and it received three stars from me on my goodreads page.

Let me know what you thought of the series in the comments!