Fairest (Lunar Chronicles, #3.5)

by Marissa Meyer

[nannah]

Oof. I love The Lunar Chronicles, and Cinder is one of my favorite books, but this one ... just wasn't a good read (for me). I get this is a novel(la?) about a villain's origin story, but reading about how this villain raped someone from basically the book's start to end isn't something I can handle. At all. And it seems to have a drastically different audience than The Lunar Chronicles that it seems like it doesn't fit well.

Book content warnings:
rape, sexual assault, noncon (from cover to cover)
reaaallly uncomfortable manipulation (")
abuse

Fairest is the origin story of Queen Levana, the villain of The Lunar Chronicles. It's more like a novella, and at the end it's revealed that it was originally a short story. Because of the very uncomfortable content, I think it would work better as a short story than a short novel. It would be so much easier to digest content like this in a shorter work, and I still think the molding of Levana's character could still get across.

It was very, very difficult to read this book, and I'm way beyond the target audience's age. Sure, I could just be a wimp with PTSD (which I am), but damn, the drawn out rape and manipulation of one of the characters by Levana at times was so graphic it was just ... too much. Way too much.

It's at times like these I'm shocked that books don't contain some kind of content warnings near the front. I mean, even movies and video games do. Why not books? People like me can get seriously triggered and have unnecessary anxiety attacks when we could instead be warned and avoid them. I don't know ...

Anyway, it's a solid novella, but the content made it extremely unenjoyable for me.