Stars Above Book Review

I’m giving Stars Above by Marissa Meyer an average number of stars.

Stars Above by Marissa Meyer gives fans of The Lunar Chronicles a deeper look with a collection of short stories. Within this collection, most of the stories focus on the characters before The Lunar Chronicles take place. Readers also are given a short story with characters new to The Lunar Chronicles world, a scene from Cinder from Kai’s point of view, and a story that takes place after the events of The Lunar Chronicles.

I’m a huge fan of The Lunar Chronicles series and will pretty much read anything that Marissa Meyer writes which takes place in this world. Needless to say, I went into Stars Above with high expectations. Although there were a few stand out stories, I only found myself mildly interested in this story collection.

I think the greatest reason I found myself not completely invested in this collection is because many of the stories take place before The Lunar Chronicles with several of the stories already being vaguely mentioned in the original series. For example, the background stories about Scarlet’s grandmother or how Cinder came to Beijing, are already mentioned in The Lunar Chronicles. These stories weren’t awful and I definitely enjoyed some of them, but it wasn’t as exciting to read stories where I already knew the ending.

As for the story that didn’t feature characters from the original series, I was slightly disappointed. I didn’t feel invested in any of the characters and I sometimes found it difficult to follow the story line. Since this felt like one of the longer stories in the collection, I struggled to finish it. I’m also not a fan of stories that are the same story from a different character’s point of view, which is Kai’s story within the collection. To me, I feel like I’m just reading the same story again.

The highlight of this collection is the final story. I heard about this story before the book and I knew it further developed some of the relationships from the original series. This story is also the only story in the collection which takes place after the original series. Out of all of the stories in this collection, this was by far my favorite. I loved seeing all my favorite characters again and getting a glimpse of their lives after all of the drama that concluded with Winter. Without giving away any spoilers, this story will really delight some die-hard shippers of Lunar Chronicles couple.

While I loved reading more stories centered on The Lunar Chronicles, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as others within the series. I appreciated learning more of the back stories of some of the characters, but only found myself loving one of the stories in the collection. I give Stars Above three out of five stars.

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