I am bringing a new feature to the blog! Over the past year or so, I’ve been posting Rank It videos on my Booktube channel. Well, I’ve posted three so far, but no matter. My point is, they’ve proven to be very popular, and I wanted to bring the list-making-awesomeness over to the blog so that my readers could experience it as well.
Rank It is basically an excuse to make lists. I rank books (from a series or by a single author) in order of my favourite to least favourite, or best to worst. I love lists, and I love books, so I thought this would be the perfect combination. To start with, I’ll be essentially be copying the series and authors that I focussed on in my videos, but I’ll stretch out a bit once I’ve caught up.
If you would rather watch me rank Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire (so far), or Gillian Flynn‘s books, then you can click on those links and they’ll take you to the videos. Now, on with the list!
#4 – Cress
I have a lot of problems with Cress, and those problems are all to do with the ship. Cress and Thorne are the main ship of this book, and while I do, admittedly, ship Thorne with someone else, that’s not the reason I dislike the canon. Cress has been living on a space shuttle for a long time, and she doesn’t know many people, nor does she have any real life experiences. But she has researched Thorne. Extensively. By the end of the book she’s in love with him, and it just didn’t feel right to me. To have a girl end up with someone that she’s idolised as a celebrity, and that someone is also the one person she’s really spent time with on Earth… it just feels gross to me.
Otherwise, it’s a good book. But those things really put me off.
#3 – Winter
While The Lunar Chronicles isn’t great for LGBTQ+ relationships (as in, there aren’t any), Meyer did a really good job by going against the usual beaten track of Snow White retellings and made Winter a person of colour. So that’s a plus. Also, I think Winter is just a really good series finale, although it was a tad long and people were running backwards and forwards a lot of the time. And there’s the Cress/Thorne thing. I don’t want to talk about it.
#2 – Cinder
Cinder is the series starter and will always hold a special place in my heart. It came out when I was still a toddler blogger (totally a legit term) and I have been able to watch Cinder and this series grow over the years. This is one of the first YA sci-fi books that I read, and it really set the bar. I loved it.
#1 – Scarlet
To the surprise of no one, Scarlet is my favourite book in the series, just as Scarlet is my favourite protagonist of them all. She’s kickass and blunt and honest and she’s basically me. That’s one of the reasons why this book is my favourite, but I also have a couple more. The first reason is that I loved the introduction of another point of view. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. I didn’t know if we’d be abandoning Cinder in favour of Scarlet’s POV, but instead we got both. It was brill. And then there was the introduction of Captain Thorne. CAPTAIN THORNE. I adore him. From that, my OTP of the series was born: Thorne/Cinder. I adore them and you can’t convince me that they weren’t in love. Scarlet was such a joy to read, because there was everything I wanted. Action, an epic ending, amazing new characters… It’s just a shame about the main ship. I don’t care for Wolf/Scarlet at all.
So, how would you rank this series?
Maraia says
THANK YOU. I was also disturbed by the Thorne-Cress ship, but Sana is the only other person who seems to agree with us. I know she’s in her late teens, but her character reads much younger, and the whole relationship seems unbalanced. I’M ALL OVER THE THORNE-CINDER SHIP. (Except Cinder and Kai are my OTP of the series, so it might have to be an OT3. I’m totally okay with that.)