"Scarlet" by Marissa Meyer

Sadly, I kind of bashed the first book in this series since I didn't realize it *was* a series and I was surprised and felt unsatisfied by the ending.  Now that I do know it is a series (of four books) and have read the second, many of my fears have been  qualmed.  The writing really is excellent.  Meyer has that "page-turning" quotient I love and creates characters that are complex and amazingly real for a Sci Fi Fairytale set hundreds of years in the future.  Meyer's greatest skill, however, is in world-building.  Important for any book, but particularly in Sci Fi, Marissa Meyer's Earth-of-the-future is believable and palpable.  Having met her recently, I get it -- she paints scenes like a filmmaker and it helps the reader to "see" the tale unfolding in front of them. 

I stand by my review of "Cinder,"(Dec 4th, 2012) the first book in the series -- in the sense that Marissa Meyer is a tremendously strong writer who weaves fairytales into SciFi like a master.  It's just that I now appreciate these books as part of a much larger epic.

SPOILER ALERT

For those who read "Cinder" and felt, as I did, that it was a story unfinished -- well, it is.  But Cinder, a character I came to love, doesn't disappear in this second book and new characters weave into the tale so seamlessly that it all makes very deep sense (many, many teasers are in the first book ... a great many of them play out here).  Prince Kai isn't the complete ****-wad I imagined him to be when Cinder ended, and I now look forward to "Cress" and "Winter" -- although "Winter," the last book in the series, isn't due out until next year. 

Keep up the good work, Marissa ... but the publishers should make it clear when something is part of a series ... yes?