Watt A Nerd Magazine Vol. 2 Iss. 2 || February 2015

Book Review: Fairest

If you haven't read the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, you need to do that now. They're more than just fairy tales with a sci-fi twist. They take place in a richly developed world, they center around brilliantly relatable characters, and even the most familiar plotline is imbued with enough twists and subversions and tension to make this a read you can't put down. And now, a few months before the release of the final installment, we've been afforded a close look at the villain of the series: the cold and calculating Queen Levana. 

Fairest: Levana's Story is not a regular book in the series, but a companion novella about half the size of those. Its purpose is to provide backstory for the antagonist of the series, whose motivations can't always be examined objectively from the POV of the main characters. 

Strangely, when I was looking up other people's reviews for it, many of them were complaining that it was a waste of time because it didn't move the story along. This suprised me because, well, of course it doesn't move the story along--it doesn't need to. This is a look back in time to before the start of the series, and it is a brilliantly-written one. 

Throughout the first three book of the Lunar Chronicles, Levana had never struck me as a particularly interesting villain. This didn't actually bother me, because the books are packed full of far more interesting heroes than any other YA series you'd care to pick up, but it was nevertheless the case. I simply didn't care much for her political schemes, and I found her obsession with her looks a rather typical villainess trope. 

But everything gets so much better after reading Fairest. Like that whole don't-look-at-me-I'm-ugly thing? She's not just a shallow beauty-obsessed female who doesn't want everyone to know she's really ugly. She's an impossibly traumatized person for whom looking at her natural skin brings back the single most painful moment of her life. I've never been a fan of situations where the pretty heroines get to go "Ha ha, the villainess is actually ugly," but this--this is good.

And if I thought she was a bit too aloof and distant to be properly scared of in the first three books, Fairest takes care of that. We see her do some pretty horendous things. Emotional manipulation. Rape. Murder. And we hear her own justifications for everything every step of the way.

There are people who say that good villains have to be sympathetic in order to be interesting. I say those people are wrong. Villains don't need to be sympathetic, they need to be believable. And thanks to Fairest, Queen Levana has become terrifyingly believable.

This is a slim book, and I read it entirely in one day. It was a day well spent. Not only did it get me excited all over again for the final book (coming out in November, why must we wait so long), but it also was a refresher on all the characters and their relationships and the rather complex background to the Lunar Chronicles. 

What did you think of Levana's Story? And if you haven't read it yet--good news! Author @marissameyer22 is on Wattpad herself--so you can go and read the first chapter of Fairest right this second. 

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This book review was written by @EstrangeloEdessa.