Proceed With Caution:
This book contains blood, violence, death, and murder.
The Basics:
Winter is the final book of The Lunar Chronicles, and of course, it is necessary to have read the previous three novels. I'd also recommend the novella Fairest. It picks up approximately where Cress left off, adding the titular character to the POV lineup.
My Thoughts:
Well, um...yeah. Winter was a big ol' mess. This series finale is bloated. It could have, and should have, been half its size. There's too much redundancy, too much repetition, too many characters, too circular plot-threads. It just goes on and on and on.
Lets talk about Winter, the character, first. She is useless. There, I said it. Princess Winter is utterly useless. She is literally just here to check off the Snow White box and the token Black girl box. She adds nothing to the story except a lot of excess pages. Several times it's mentioned how she can just bat her eyes and people will fawn over her. That is not an exaggeration. That is actually what happens. She blinks and everyone throws themselves at her feet because she's just so beautiful and so wonderful. This makes absolutely no sense. She adds nothing. I don't see how Levana didn't kill her already.
The actual book Winter was also mostly useless. It is incredibly repetitive. The characters come up with a plan, said plan gets interrupted, things are delayed, they start back up and things go wrong. Lather, rinse, repeat. Multiple times. Also, every several chapters a different character gets separated from the pack, then reunited, only for someone else to go missing. It's a lot of run around for no real reason except to add pages.
Speaking of characters going missing and characters being useless, Cress is the only useful character. None of this could have happened without her. Without Cress no one would have been able to get around anywhere, have daring escapes, get messages around, etc etc etc. Cress is the true hero here. Every single plan relies on her doing her hacker thing. Even when she's not with the group, she's doing important things to move the plot forward. No one else is as essential as she is. Not even Cinder.
Speaking of Cinder and her grand plan that made no sense: expose Levana. And I don't mean reveal her evil plans to the people. She meant to unveil her, literally. Show the people her real face. We already know that Levana keeps her glamour up at all times, she doesn't allow photographs or video, and certainly no androids can look upon her. Clearly something is going on beyond simple vanity. If you read Fairest, then you know what's really hiding under her veil and it's simply tragic. Cinder's grand scheme was to uncover that secret to the world. Yes, Levana plays dirty and needed to be stopped, but that was just downright cruel. And honestly, what kind of message does that send? She must be defeated because she's ugly?
Levana's defeat happens off the page and we don't even get a recap of what happened. That's all I have to say about that.
I am just disappointed in this finale. I was so excited going into this, especially after reading Fairest. It was just a lot of filler and fake build up. The stakes were already high, we didn't need all of this added nonsense.