I absolutely love the overall work of Marissa Meyer. No, not the ex-president of Yahoo!, but the author of assorted sci-fi and fantasy books, most notably the Lunar Chronicles series. I’ve read all her books to date, and I’ve enjoyed them all except for the Alice in Wonderland prequel Heartless. Please let it be noted that I am not saying Heartless is bad, because it’s not. It’s objectively quite good. I just didn’t enjoy it because it’s a very bleak, rather depressing book. If you enjoy that sort of book, by all means, descend upon it like a swarm of locusts and gobble it up.

And like most of her readers, I was first introduced to Marissa Meyer through the Lunar Chronicles’ first volume, Cinder, which is a retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale with an Asian sci-fi twist, with interstellar politics and a plague. I won’t go into too many details about the overall plot, which stretches over four books, a prequel, a collection of short stories, and a sequel two-part graphic novel. But suffice to say that each of the main books focuses on a fairy tale that is reimagined in a sci-fi setting – Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Rapunzel – which is folded into Meyer’s universe of the oppressive Lunar civilization, a plague, futuristic unified versions of Africa, Asia and Europe, and so on.

So if you enjoy science fiction, or if you enjoy fairy tales… or both… this is a good young-adult series. It also has some pretty healthy romances in it, while still including some superficial bad-boy/Prince Charming archetypes.

The original covers were fairly pretty, but I absolutely love the new covers that they’re rereleasing the books with. As in, I might buy the books again so I can possess these beautiful covers.

Also, read the Renegades trilogy. It’s also very good. Maybe I’ll babble about that later.