★★★★☆ Backstories, a wedding, and one more thing

Stars Above

Marissa Meyer

Stars Above is, as the subtitle says, a collection of stories about characters from the cyberpunk world of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles. And yes, you DO need to read the four main novels, Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter. If you don't, you will not know who the characters are, with the exception of one story -- I'll get to that. (You can probably dispense with Fairest -- I'm not recommending that you do, since that's a good story. But you can understand most of Stars Above without Fairest.)

There are nine stories. These are longish stories. The first one, "The Keeper", is really a novella. Seven of these stories tell backstories of major characters from the Lunar Chronicles: Cinder and Scarlet, Wolf, Carswell, Cress, Winter and Jacin, and Kai, Cinder, and Iko. If you liked the Lunar Chronicles, you will not want to miss these insights into the characters and where they came from. There's one other story about characters from the Lunar Chronicles, but this one is an epilog rather than a backstory. It's called "Something Old, Something New", and as you probably guess from the title, is about a wedding.

That leaves one story, "The Little Android", which I believe to be the story Meyer herself saw as the focus of the collection. The book title, Stars Above, is a reference to this story. You will not be surprised to learn that it is a fairy tale retelling -- of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Fair warning here: this is not Disney's Little Mermaid. Andersen's Little Mermaid is a substantially darker story than Disney's. Meyer's "The Little Android" transplants Andersen's story into the cyperpunk world of the Lunar Chronicles. It is a fairly faithful retelling, in my estimation. I didn't recognize any of the characters of "The Little Android" from the Lunar Chronicles. If they're in the Lunar Chronicles, it is only as minor characters.

"The Little Android" was my favorite story of the collection.

The book finishes with an excerpt from Heartless, which is, I gather an Alice prequel. It was enough to make me add Heartless to my to-read list.

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