FAIREST

*spoiler alert

Meet young Levana— alone, unloved, and wicked as ever. This is where her reign of terror all began. Fairest is a companion book to the The Lunar Chronicles series that helps give background to the events prior to the first book of the series.

Levana is one of the worst villains I have ever read.. and that’s a good thing.

This was one of the most well written books of the series. Being inside of Levana's head when she began her psychotic tendencies made my skin crawl. Her twisted way of justifying her actions was taken to a new level in this novella.

Meyers writes the whole series from the third person point of view and there are very few times were I have felt as connected to a character in the third person as I did through the progression of this story. Maybe because her actions and thoughts were so sick but, I felt every single one of the motions throughout every sentence of this novella.

The sickest part of this novella was reading about her marriage to Evret Hayle. It was not only forcing him to marry her but, also this idea of morphing herself into who he was in love with in order to gain his acceptance. She had a very contorted vision of marriage and love.

I learned from this that her villainess really came from a place of both pain and vanity. All she wanted was love that she was both deprived of by her family but also caused by herself. In Cress, she talks about wanting and failing for love with her first husband and now with her second she is going to gain the love for a planet so I think her twistedness is really this longing for love. She also couldn't come to terms with who she was before of these scars that she had. But, she didn't understand that it wasn't important. Lunar society focused too much on the wrong things.

A parallel I found between her characters and Cress was that even though they are nothing like one another in their disposition it is interesting that in both of their solitude they both took two different male figures and made them into people that they weren’t. (Cress with Thorne and Levana with Evret) They tried to find comfort in others and failing that they were forced to become the "hero" of their own stories. Where Cress chose to fight for the good of the world, Levana chose to become the world's worst nightmare.

You should definitely read this book if you have read The Lunar Chronicles. This book along with Cress were my favorite books of the series! 5/5 stars!!!

NOTE: I read this book after having finished Winter and before I read Stars Above. Some people recommend reading this book in between Cress and Winter and I believe it is listed as book #3.5. As I’ve written before I made parallels between Cress and what was written in this book but, my experience was not changed by reading this later on in the series. Either way works.