Winter (The Lunar Chronicles #4) by Marissa Meyer (REVIEW}

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? 

Book Title:Winter (The Lunar Chronicles #4)
Author: Marissa Meyer
Genre:Young Adult, Fantasy, Science fiction, Retelling
Publication Date: November 10th 2015
                                                  by Feiwel and Friends
Previous book in the series: Cress (The Lunar Chronicles #3)
 

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
My Review:

So this has been sitting in my dash for a long time, partly because I wasn't sure how to rte this book. I pretty much went OTT cray over the previous ones but I have mixed reaction as far as this one is concerned. There are several things I LOVED about the book and things that troubled me like hell. 

Characters.

I loved how Meyer sketched her characters in this series. I'm always partial to Kai and Cinder, a fact that I proudly admit, but Meyer has this amazing quality to make the readers connect to the characters and the same thing happened with all the major and minor characters here. I loved Iko, Kai, Cinder, Scarlet, Wolf, Thorne, Cress, Jacin, Winter and even Wolf's Mom! One thing that both irritated and impressed me was Jacin's indifference to the big mighty revolution and all revolving around Cinder. Cinder could've jumped in a pit for all he cared. His main concern, possibly the only concern throughout the book (and beyond) was Winter's well-being, keeping Winter safe; even it meant killing himself in the process. He appeared downright selfish at some points because of this, but hey, the guy is crazy in love with Winter :p As far as character sketches go, the only thing that bothered me was Levana's portrayal.

Levana.

If you've seen my review of Fairest, you would know I share an extreme kinda undefinable feeling for Levana. I hate her guts, but my heart goes out to her. I feel like punching her in the face for all she did, and yet I cannot help giving the girl whose was just a victim at some point. My question is, where did that Levana go? All I saw in the book was a queen gone nuts and throwing fits by the end of the book. I didn't see a delusional woman, a "fair" queen gone rogue, or a vindictive woman who never lets anything or anyone mess with her plans. The only thing about Levana I did like was when she tricked Winter and gave her the plague. That part is amazingly, nail-bitingly good and is a fairytale retelling in the truest sense.

Relationships.

Did I ever say I love how the relationships are shown in the series? Meyer takes her sweet time to draw each of the characters, relates them in a jaw-droppingly wonderful way and develops the relationship arcs bit by bit. For the couples, you can practically see them babies meeting each other and falling in love minute by minute :') Winter is no exception. Even though it revolves around Winter, and therefore her relationship to Jacin, Meyer never gives you the chance to miss the other couples very much. There is Wolf dying in the inside thinking about Scarlet, there is Thorne with his womenizing ways and Cress, forever in love with him but too afraid to let him break her heart again, and there is my favorite, Cinder and Kai. Even though one doesn't see Jacin and Winter growing up, the flashbacks throughout the book is enough to understand the special kind of bond the two share. 

Ending...and other things.

You have a tyrannical ruler. You have a long-lost princess of a royal crown. You have a revolution and a moonful (and earthful) of  people counting on you to overthrow the queen. What do you do? Ta-da. You resort to multimedia to show how awful the queen looks. Because being ugly equals to bad, BAD queen. Not trying to turn a novel into an issue of feminist argument, I don't think that's a right message to pass to the readers. It's an AMAZING series. All the earlier books showed such fireworks that the readers started to expect maybe a little more (or a lot) from the book than fair. For me, the ending was just anti-climactic. I wanted to like the ending so bad that I couldn't like it at all. Sure, beauty, jealousy and insecurities are the themes that prevailed the original fairytale of Snow White. Sure, Levana is one mad-ass queen thriving to be the "fairest" among them all, metaphorically and literally. Sure, people seeing her true face would be life-devastatingly bad for her. But the Levana I know, she would not back down for this stunt pulled by her enemies. She would not be overthrown just because people now knows how she looks. Yes, it is HORRIBLE for her. Yes, it end-of-the-world bad. But also, she is not that little girl anymore who would stand people making fun of her. When you put the real Levana and the climax-Levana side by side, you'd be disappointed. But then again. who are we to judge? Maybe she obsessed over beauty so much it became too much for her to face people after they've seen her face. Obsessed people can do strange things. But as for me, I am not convinced.