Like Cinder, fairy tales are more inspiration than outline. We don’t see a lot of Kai in this book, but enough to continue to feel sympathetic for the young and reluctant emperor. Kai is left picking up the pieces in New Beijing, and the Lunar Queen is horrified that Cinder has escaped. Iko returns when her personality chip is installed in the spaceship. Meanwhile, Cinder is escaping from jail and ends up needing to bring along Thorne, a (he thinks) very dashing American pilot who stole a spaceship. We learn that Scarlet’s grandmother has been kidnapped and Scarlet has to figure out whether or not she can trust Wolf as she tries to rescue her grandmother. Scarlet finds herself defending the girl and getting into a bar brawl.

Everyone is watching the news about the cyborg girl who got arrested at the prince’s ball in the Eastern Commonwealth, and the patrons are saying awful things about Cinder. It takes place right after the previous book ends, but it starts in France where Scarlet has just delivered vegetables to a local pub. Scarlet skews toward the older end of Cinder’s tween audience. (I talked with Jocelyn Koehler about retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood.”) The fact that it adds “Little Red Riding Hood” to the fairy tale mix was a bonus. Of course, as soon as the book was in my house, it moved to the top of my huge “to read” pile. I usually wait until an entire series (or at least most of it) is published before I start reading-that avoids the situation of anxiously waiting for the next book to come out, a situation I faced with Scarlet, the hotly anticipated sequel to Cinder.

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