***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: Beautiful prose, setting, and characterization, plus a lovely portrayal of the inner life of children, but I'm not sure the coming-of-age themes are as deep as they hope they're being.

This book is deliberately a bit dream-like, capturing how the mind of a child experiences the adult world, and the inevitable loss of innocence as a result. It also deliberately raises more questions than it answers, with wobbling success for me. I was initially spellbound because of the ambiguity throughout, but I have to say that later, when I had finished, I didn't dwell as much as I thought I would--I was happy to let it rest--which means that something missed the mark, ever so slightly.

The prose is beautiful and lilting. This is genuinely talented storytelling, and it's such a slim novel that it's worth reading for the language alone. The setting is Australia during the Vietnam war. Eleven schoolgirls go on an impromptu outing with their somewhat free-spirited (bordering on hippie) teacher. The impetus is the teacher's dismay at the hanging of Ronald Ryan (who would turn out to be the last man legally executed in Australia). She takes the girls to the park to visit with the gardener there, Morgan, whom she's enamored with. She has groomed the image of Morgan in the girls' mind as a poet and a peaceful draft-resister, and the girls are taken by his beautiful voice and owly eyes. Morgan leads them all to see supposedly aboriginal cave paintings (it's unclear whether the paintings are really there, or the girls imagine them, or they are there but are more modern handprints), stopping to gently carry one of the girls who has scraped her knee in a fall. Once in the cave, the girls are frightened of the dark and head out on their own, leaving Miss Renshaw and Morgan behind. The adults never reappear, even as the tide consumes the beach. The children go back to their classroom, only to learn later that both Miss Renshaw and Morgan are missing, and even later (from the newspaper) that Morgan had committed a violent crime in the past.

Learning about loss. What follows is the girls coming to terms with the fact that their teacher will likely never return. They learn the dark real-world possibilities while fabricating lighter versions of their own, and struggling with the issue of whether and what to tell about her disappearance. She had asked them to keep Morgan as "their little secret," and at first they oblige, until Bethany's fragile sobbing takes her to the school counselor and she spills everything. Miss Renshaw had said the activity at the park would be to "think about death," and in fact that day turns into an eight-year rumination on the concept of death and loss, as the girls come to terms with her permanent disappearance. 

At the end we see a core group of four of the girls graduating (including Cubby and Icara, who are unspoken best friends), and on their last day of school they seemingly bump into Miss Renshaw, who feeds them bits and pieces of her personal history since her disappearance that seem to jibe with some of the hopeful guesses the girls had made all those years ago (she ran off with him spontaneously; they left out a back entrance). In keeping with the small instances of magical realism in the novel, Dubosarsky leaves some question as to whether Miss Renshaw is a ghost: she's wearing the same outfit she disappeared in, her hair looks the same, and Cubby sees the necklace that was torn off her neck in the cave. In an absolute coup of writing, the Miss Renshaw who was somewhat magical to the children (with her perfect, loopy handwriting, and literary passions) is now seen through the lens of more jaded teenagers as eccentric, flighty, and irresponsible.

Instances of magical realism: the words growing on the blackboard "Not now. Not ever;" Cubby's sensation of floating through an entire day; the maybe-there cave handprints; the way Miss Summers' hair is the same coppery cap as when she started teaching. In general, many things are wonderfully planted that help the dream-like narrative. For instance, one of the girls suggests on the beach that there may be another exit from the cave, and eight years later Miss Renshaw (or her apparition) confirms that Morgan led her out the back way. 

But some things are planted and then abandoned. The very first line of the text is: "The year began with the hanging of one man and the drowning of another." The drowned man (whom I later learned was the Prime Minister, Harold Holt) is never mentioned again. Australian readers may have known instantly that it was him because of the year, but I was confused and had to do research in order to place this piece in the puzzle. I would have liked Dubosarsky to more deliberately bookend the year with Holt, to have shown the girls' reaction. Also, the senior prefect, Amanda-fit-to-be-loved is somehow intimately tied with Icara's family, and it's a source of pain or embarrassment for Icara, but we never learn how, or what it means. 

Miss Renshaw the ghost. Your takeaway feeling about this book can't help but hinge on the ending. Her appearance is necessary if Dubosarsky wants to highlight the ambiguity of her story. But was the ambiguity necessary? Wasn't the point that these girls have lost their innocence? Adding Miss Renshaw as a ghost makes the world seem childishly magical again, which I think is at odds with the growth that all the girls have taken toward Icara's (marvelous) cynicism. Is the point perhaps that we grow up, we become more pragmatic, but somewhere inside we retain the fantasy that defined our young minds? Dubosarsky is such a talented writer, I'm inclined to believe that's what she meant, but I would have liked her to have taken her time unfolding that concept for us in that scene.

In sum: this book is definitely worth the time to read it, but mostly for the language and descriptive passages and tone. For some reason it didn't linger or change this reader inside.   

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: This series is the embodiment of Good Clean Fun: the prose is competent; the plots are are sweet, straightforward, and move at a nice clip; each book is gobbleable.  

Scarlet is the sequel to Cinder, which I've also read (but haven't reviewed on Booklikes). To say they're fairy-tale re-imaginings is a bit misleading and doesn't give them enough credit. Meyer uses a few of the tropes from the original tales as touchstones (Cinder is the maligned stepdaughter, for instance, and there is a final ball where her wardrobe malfunction is not a glass slipper but a wonky cyborg foot), but the characters and the story line are all Meyer's. What separates these books from re-tellings is their ambition: there's an over-arching plot to all four books that's wholly unrelated to the original fairy tales. The evil Lunar queen Levana wants to marry Prince Kai on earth, kill him to take over the Eastern Commonwealth, and use the power of that position to conquer Earth. The first book introduced Cinder, and showed the kindling relationship between her and Kai--though the ending left that couple physically and emotionally estranged. The second book is Scarlet's story, but with Cinder's story still barreling alongside it, intertwining with it. The snowball effect of adding girls in each book, each with her own sub-story, culminating with one larger narrative, is both fun and a big writing project. (The third book will be Cress [Rapunzel], and the fourth will be Winter [Snow White].) I'm looking forward to seeing the sum of parts equal a rollicking whole.

The considerable positives of this series are: bright women who have strong characters and personal skills and don't think much about gender; romance without sex (at least so far, for readers who aren't ready for that); and fast-paced plotting. (Though the action scenes are a bit clunky and wordy.) 

This second book is Scarlet's story. Scarlet is loosely (very loosely) based on Little Red Riding Hood: there is a missing grandmother, Scarlet wears a red hoodie, she delivers produce (in crates, not a basket), the villains are genetically-hybrid wolf-Lunars, and for a moment the Lunar Jedi mind-trick makes Scarlet mistake a wolf-Lunar for her grandmother.

I think Scar suffers a bit from having to share her story line with Cinder, as she pales somewhat in comparison. We don't feel as "in her skin" as we want; we see what she's supposed to be like (impulsive, reckless in her loyalty) but we don't feel it in our core. Scarlet sometimes seems senselessly angry, and is too quick to fall in love, while Cinder is spunky and resourceful in this installment, guarded in her feelings about Kai, and not taking any seducing from the delightfully buffoonish Captain Thorne.

The writing may contribute to this. The prose is perfectly serviceable but sometimes ordinary, with a few repetitive physical descriptions meant to signal emotions, like sweat gathering on the back of necks, surprised faces, thumping hearts, constricting lungs. In order to make it clear that Scarlet is impulsive, Meyer gives her a sort of flat, "telling" temper tantrum right at the opening, when she finds out that the police have closed the case of her missing grandmother. Scarlet takes a load of tomatoes that she's delivering to a restaurant and throws many of them against the restaurant's exterior wall by the delivery entrance. It wasn't a believable reaction for me--this is produce she labored to grow on her farm, and the income from it is her living--and it hints at Meyer's ticking off the first scene in her outline: "Scarlet  is upset that her grandmother is missing; she reacts emotionally to the news that the police will no longer search for her. Later in the scene she meets Wolf." 

The technical prowess of the plot suffers a bit--though I was happy to overlook it--from characters being slow on the uptake and hiding information from each other. There is a long literary history of this, but it should probably be used sparingly. For example, even if Scarlet is determined to rescue her grandmother by bartering her secret, wouldn't she pause for a moment to contemplate her grandmother's equally fierce protection of that same secret? Would her grandmother witness the torture of her own son, let him be killed, and let herself remain captive if the secret weren't vitally important--more important than their lives? Does Scarlet really want to enter the wolf's lair carrying Princess Selene's identity on a silver platter? I believe Meyer tries to minimize Scarlet's betrayal of her grandmother's cause by making the information obsolete by the time Scarlet arrives...but we know that Scarlet didn't know that going in. Also, it took Wolf and Scarlet a bit too long to understand that Cinder is Selene--they have more information than anyone: Scarlet's memory that a girl was given to a man named Linh from the Eastern Commonwealth, combined with the footage of Linh Cinder at the ball. And again, what exactly do we gain in terms of plot by having Cinder hold back her identity from Iko and Thorne? 

I wondered for a moment why Captain Thorne stayed with Cinder. It's written as if he's a rogue who finds her amusing and pretty, but is that really enough motivation for a character who's an escaped convict to lend her the use of his ship? Although his personality is charming, he's painted as a broad stroke so far, and I look forward to having him fleshed out in future installments.

The love between Scarlet and Wolf is perhaps meant to be like the loyalty of wolves--born quickly and cemented early--but it doesn't quite work for me on Scarlet's side. She sees only the good in Wolf after a significant betrayal, and risks everything (including the safety of Cinder and Thorne) to protect Wolf, without having enough evidence that he won't betray her again or kill her. I would have liked to have seen more pass between them, before she gives him her heart. This deficiency is perhaps exacerbated by the fact of the two girls sharing a story line--there just weren't enough Scarlet pages to develop the relationship to a meaningful depth.

Finally, I worried about the way Kai "sacrificed" himself by agreeing to marry Levana. He stops the battle, but he knows he's majorly losing the war in doing so. Would a real leader do that? While Kai himself feels green and uncertain, having taken the throne young, I believe we're meant to trust that he's a natural leader. (In fact, this book is in a long tradition of YA literature that lulls us into supporting "monarchy in the right hands," which kind of makes my skin crawl. [See also the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.] But I digress.) Kai knows Levana's ultimate plan, he knows he'll be killed, he knows he'll  actually aid her in taking over the planet if he marries her. We don't get to see his military advisers and generals discussing this issue with him--surely they wouldn't want this solution? We wonder how prepared his country might be, in their opinion, to fight a ground war against the Lunars (even with their wolf-hybrid army). The Eastern Commonwealth must be prepared to protect the country to some extent, and I want to know just how much.

In the end, though, you should just let these little holes and Scarlet's lack of screen time wash over you. Meyer wants to entertain you and she's damned good at it. Let her do it.

(A quibble on the cover: I love illustrated covers, but this one is vastly inferior to the clever foot/shoe of Cinder, and the braid/arm of Cress. The artist needed to study flapping capes, and to base this on an actual photographic image. Capes are usually nearly full circles of fabric. If you laid this cape out flat, it wouldn't be a coherent geometric shape at all, and there isn't enough material at the neck. This is the unfortunate weak entry in an otherwise clever series of cover illustrations.)