SCARLET

*spoiler alert

Our twisted version of Little Red Riding Hood begins in rural France. Young Scarlet and her grandmother who has a terrible and dark secret that is going to shake up Scarlet's whole world. When going to save her grandmother, she didn’t realize she would be saving the whole world. Along the way she meets Wolf, a mysterious figure who just arrived in her very small town comes to turn her life upside down.

I had trouble with this book. It is not that it wasn’t a good storyline because it I feel that the storyline had great potential--it just didn’t live up to it.

The beginning hit the nail on the head and provided a great setup for the story to unfold. A mysterious young man participating in pit fights comes out of nowhere, a girl who’s grandmother just went missing, but her disappearance is dismissed because most people think she's a crazy old bat. An adventure to find her while facing danger from people she doesn’t know. Instead of the tension and excitement building, the story just kind of flattened out.

As a character, I felt there wasn’t a lot to connect with Scarlet, I didn’t connect with her the way I did with Cinder. I felt the same way about Wolf.

I also found their love story to have been very rushed. I think the author could have worked more with this interesting connection they discovered between themselves before they were head over heels in love. I mean they had only known each other a few days before he literally betrayed her.

In terms of Wolf, his role was obviously to play this mysterious, brooding type male romance figure. I think I might have felt different if his character and storyline could have been explored more. I feel it was a bit thrown onto the page how he is the only one just refusing orders because of this internal thing he has going on.

I was much more interested in reading about what Cinder, Thorne, and Kai were up to rather than Scarlet or Wolf.

Thorne. I absolutely loved him. He gave us the perfect amount of comedic relief that we needed and I absolutely lived for the banter between him and Cinder.

I’m conflicted about how I feel about Kai’s storyline. In one sense I didn’t care for it in the book, however, I also feel that could be because we see him the least so I didn’t really care to connect. In an interesting twist, where in a book a girl character only exists for the guy, it seems this guy only exists to protect and try to help our female protagonist. At the same time, I think we heard enough from him for the time being. I think he will be more important in the later books because it was more important to establish Thorne and Cinder’s mission and how their fates/storylines collide with Scarlet and Wolf’s than it did Kai with the other characters so his role made sense for this story.

To end this review on a positive note, I want to talk about some things I liked in this book. Meyer’s does a great job of intertwining all the stories and POV’s.

Her originality is something refreshing. As I’ve mentioned before I was worried about reading TLC because I didn’t want to read another typical boring fairytale remake. And while the cliche still lies there, she creates unique storylines and plot twists that give each of these old school plot lines character and shape. No longer incapable damsels of distress or helpless school girls but, independently thinking young women.

Overall this book did not leave me like Cinder did where I was absolutely dying to read the next book but, I was interested to see where the gang was headed so inevitably I had to finish what I started and keep reading on. I give this book 3.5/5 stars!