This science fiction book by Marissa Meyer is the third book in the ” Lunar Chronicles” series and is published by Feiwel and Friends, a division of Macmillan Publishers.
Cress is written for kids ages 12 and up. The age range reflects readability and not necessarily content appropriateness.
Crescent Moon, or Cress, as she is called, is a 16-year-old Lunar girl who has been imprisoned in a satellite station for most of her life. Cress was born without bioelectric Lunar ability and is considered to be a “shell” by her people. All shell babies are taken away from their parents to be killed, but they are actually secretly kept alive and their blood is used for experiments. Cress proved that she was adept with technology at a young age, so Queen Levana’s head Thaumatuge, Sybil Mira, locked her in a satellite orbiting Earth. There, she serves as Levana’s programmer and hacker, spying on Earth’s heads of state.
In previous novels, Cress sent messages through Emperor Kai’s android, warning him that Levana intended to marry Kai only to become empress and then kill him. The message was discovered by Cinder, a cybernetic teenage girl, who later found out that she is the orphaned princess of Luna, Levana’s niece and the true heir to the throne. In order to secure the crown, Levana tried to kill Cinder when she was a toddler by setting fire to her nursery. Unbeknownst to Levana, Cinder survived the assassination attempt and was smuggled to Earth by Lunars who wish to overthrow the queen. As a result of this fire, parts of Cinder’s body were severely injured and had to be replaced with cybernetic parts.
Cinder was arrested for trying to kill Levana, but Dr. Dimitri Erland, the leading researcher for the letumosis plague, gives Cinder tools to help her escape, telling her to find him in Africa after she breaks out. Dr. Erland is secretly a Lunar living on Earth. He had a shell daughter, Cresent Moon, who was taken away according to lunar law. He believes she is dead. Dr. Erland escaped his world and has worked to find the true Lunar heir, who he hopes will depose Levana.
Cinder and another prisoner, Carswell Thorne, escape and retrieve Thorne’s stolen ship, the Rampion. Through technology, Cress helps Cinder and Thorne evade the authorities. Dr. Erland asks Cinder to meet him in Africa, but first, she goes in search of an Earthen woman and another Lunar scientist who helped her escape from Luna as a toddler. She finds out they have both died. After helping the woman’s granddaughter, Scarlet Benoit, and a Lunar operative, Wolf, escape from the Lunars, Cinder decides to find Cress in order to uncover Levana’s secrets.
Cinder and her crew (Scarlet, Wolf and Thorne) contact Cress and agree to rescue her from her satellite prison. Cress packs up her meager belongings and prepares for rescue, but an unexpected visit from Sybil Mira turns dangerous. Cress is shy, socially awkward and has extremely long, blond hair. It has never been cut. She also has followed Thorne’s career of civil disobedience from a distance for years and has a crush on him.
Mira discovers Cress’ intentions and sets a trap for Cinder and her crew. The trap results in Scarlet being captured, Wolf being shot and Thorne and Cress being trapped in the satellite as it falls toward Earth. During the ambush, Cinder manages to use her Lunar mind control gift on Mira’s pilot, Jacin Clay, forcing Clay to help her fight off Mira. Afterward, Clay tells Cinder that he is faithful to Lunar’s one true ruler, and he will help her regain her throne. Cinder is skeptical, but needs all the help she can get.
The crew is now separated, with Cinder not knowing if Thorne and Scarlet are dead or alive. With Wolf unconscious and dying from his gunshot wound, Cinder makes the decision to meet with Dr. Erland in Africa to get his help. Dr. Erland is continuing his plague research in a small village in Africa, using blood from a colony of Lunars that have been secretly living there. Immigration from Luna is illegal, so the people who do escape live on Earth in secret. The Lukemosis virus has been killing Earthens for more than a decade, but Dr. Erland reveals to Cinder that there is a mutated version of the disease that can kill Lunars as well.
Cinder lands in the small desert town of Farafrah in North Africa and meets Dr. Erland. The doctor tends to Wolf’s wounds, while the people in the town, most of them fugitive Lunars, bring Cinder gifts and tell her how much hope they have that she will overthrow Levana.
Cress and Thorne survive the satellite’s crash landing in the Sahara Desert, but Thorne hits his head during the fall and is now blind. He has to rely on Cress to direct them through the desert with the meager resources they scrape together from the satellite. Cress cuts off her hair and fashions shoes out of cloth. She has lived so long in the confines of the satellite so it isn’t long before she begins to get severe blisters on her feet. Additionally, both Cress and Thorne suffer horribly from sunburn, heat exhaustion, starvation and dehydration. Near death, they are found by a group of travelers who sell wares from town to town. Thorne lies to the group, telling them that he and Cress are newly married and were robbed while on their honeymoon. Thorne is still a fugitive, and he knows the authorities must have found the crashed Lunar satellite by now.
News of the satellite spreads, and the travelers, who turn out to be Lunar traffickers, deduce that Cress is Lunar. They kidnap Cress and sell her to Dr. Erland, who is known in the area to buy Lunar subjects for his experiments. When the kidnappers sell Cress to Dr. Erland, he is struck by how much she looks like his wife. Before he pays for her, he draws her blood. He believes his daughter was killed by Levana’s order, but he holds out hope that this is her, and the tests confirm that he is her father. He holds on to the information, with plans to talk with her in the future. Thorne follows Cress, determined to rescue her.
Before long, Cress, Thorne, Wolf and Cinder are reunited. Cinder sees a news feeds that Thorne has been spotted. They prepare to leave town together, but the authorities find them. With the help of the Lunar townspeople, who use their bioelectric gift, the group escapes.
Aboard the Rampion, Cinder hatches an elaborate plan to infiltrate the castle and kidnap the groom, Emperor Kai, to stop the wedding. She knows this act will start a war, but she plans to take the crew to Luna, reveal that she is Princess Selene and rally the Lunars to dethrone Levana.
Using stolen invitations, Cress and Wolf attend the wedding as guests. Wolf incapacitates the guards while Cress deactivates all the palace security systems. Dr. Erland and Thorne sneak into the palace’s medical wing. There, Dr. Erland works to cure Thorne’s blindness, as well as raise the plague alarm and provide a distraction for Cinder.
While in the labs, Dr. Erland sees the first signs of the mutated form of the plague in himself, so he leaves a video message for Cress and quarantines himself. Cinder goes to Kai’s private quarters and tries to convince him to go with her, but when he won’t because of his responsibilities as a ruler, she shoots him with a tranquilizer dart and kidnaps him.
The group meets at the medical lab where a quarantined Dr. Erland tells Cress (through portioned glass) that he is her father, he never wanted to abandon her, and he has always loved her. They are forced to leave him to die. Just before they are to get in the waiting escape pod, they realize their pilot, Clay, has been taken. Mira now has control of their ship. The group fights with the Lunar soldiers, but the main battle is between Cinder and Mira. Cinder succeeds in breaking Mira’s mind, driving her insane. This leads Mira to jump off the palace roof to her death.
Levana goes to the quarantined area of the lab to see Dr. Erland. He tells the queen that instead of killing shells, her researchers have used their blood to create the plague for biological warfare. The Lunars, who escaped to Earth, unknowingly brought the plague with them, as was Levana’s plan. The cure can only be made using the blood of shells. Dr. Erland dies after telling Levana that Cinder is the true heir to the Lunar throne and will overthrow the queen.
Safely aboard the Rampion, Thorne tells Cress that his crimes were not heroic or noble, but were actually selfish, self-serving acts on his part. He is afraid that now she really knows him, she will think differently of him. Cress does not admit it, but she in more in love with Thorne than ever before.
Kai wakes up and is furious to find himself in orbit aboard the Rampion. He confronts Cinder with his fear that this will start a war. Cinder tells him that war is inevitable; marrying Levana would never have stopped it. Kai admits that it was a bad decision, but he had no other choice. Cinder asks him to join with her to stop Levana’s rule.
She reveals that she is Princess Selene. At first Kai is shocked, but then he realizes that this is why Levana put so much time, effort and resources into catching and killing Cinder.
He asks Cinder if she ever used mind control on him, and she tells him she never did and never will. They kiss but stop when Cinder sees a news feed that Levana’s armies have massacred all the people, both Lunars and Earthens alike, in Farafrah.
Cinder is heartbroken and feels responsible for the deaths of innocent people, whose only fault was that they helped her escape. Cinder also admits to Kai that she is scared of Levana and of peoples’ expectations of her to be their princess. She is also fearful that using her power makes her a lot like Levana. Kai assures her that she is not like Levana and tells her that Lunars don’t need another princess; they need a revolution. The couple get word that Luna has attacked all the countries on Earth. Cinder tells Kai she is going to Luna to start a revolution.
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Princess Winter, Levana’s stepdaughter, chooses not to use her bioelectric ability, but the lack of use is driving her insane. She sees visions of things happening with loved ones who are far away from her and events in the future. Cress sees a desert animal for the first time and imagines that it is an ancient animal goddess that can lead them to safety. Cinder uses her telekinetic ability to control those who she wants to help or hurt. Other Lunars also use their telekinetic abilities to get people to do their bidding.
Cinder’s aunt is hunting her down to kill her. Kai’s adviser, Konn Torin, provides sound advice and wise counsel. He does not approve of Cinder or Kai’s feelings for her, but when she tells Torin that she has a plan to stop Levana, he believes her and helps Cinder kidnap the emperor.
Dr. Erland loved his baby, Crescent Moon, regardless of her being a shell, and begged to keep her. When she was taken, he thought she was killed. Ever since, he has hated Levana and worked to depose her. He feels guilty for creating the cyborg draft, knowing he is responsible for the deaths of so many cyborgs in his quest to find Cinder and a cure for the plague. He also feels a lot of guilt for the many Lunar shells that he has experimented on. He doesn’t initially tell Cress that he’s her father because he thinks she will hate him when she finds out what he has done. Before he dies, he tells her that he has always loved her. Cress tells him goodbye but cannot bring herself to tell him that she loves him, too, because she does not know him.
Language and name calling includes stupid and stars, used as if they were swear words.
The violence depicted in Cress is graphic, but less than the violence depicted in the second book in the series, Scarlet. Cress has numerous violent scenes where there are fights and people are shot. Blood is described repeatedly throughout the book, and Mira is driven to madness. She commits suicide by jumping from the roof of a building.
When Mira realizes that Cress will be rescued from the satellite, she drags the girl by the hair, ties her up and gags her. She fights Thorne and uses her ability to control Scarlet. She has Scarlet fly back to the Rampion. Then Mira and her guard attack Wolf and Cinder. They shoot Wolf. Cress and Throne crash violently in the desert where Throne hits his head and temporarily loses his eyesight.
Kidnappers take Cress and throw her in the back of a truck. She is roughly transported to Dr. Erland. The kidnappers negotiate a price with the doctor. After they leave, Cress punches the doctor in his face and escapes. When Wolf wakes from his coma and learns that Scarlet has been taken, he becomes enraged, destroys the furniture in the room and tries to choke Cinder.
Scarlet is taken to Luna. She is given to a wealthy family as a pet for their young son to test his Lunar gift. The boy is sadistic, creating realistic illusions of snakes, vermin and insects attacking Scarlet. They cause her to gouge her own flesh to make it stop. She is also chained and collared so she cannot escape. Scarlet is then taken before Levana for questioning. When she refuses to answer the queen’s questions about Cinder, Levana has Scarlet’s pinky finger chopped off.
Wolf and Cress use stolen invitations to enter the palace for the wedding, and Wolf physically incapacitates several guards to get to the palace’s security room. Cinder fights a palace droid and damages it. When Kai refuses to escape with her, she shoots him with a tranquilizing dart. The group intends to escape the palace via the roof, but they find several Lunar soldiers waiting for them. Mira takes control of Wolf’s mind and turns him on Cinder. Wolf knocks Cinder to the ground and goes after her throat. When Iko (in a new android body that Throne won in a card game) tries to stop Wolf by jumping on his back, he grabs her and twists her head, rips the skin from around her throat and exposes wiring. At the end of the novel, Iko is physically damaged, but otherwise she is fine.
During the battle, several Lunar soldiers are shot. Some are injured, and others are killed. Cinder gets word that Lunar soldiers have murdered all the people in the town of Farafrah and other soldiers have attacked several Earthen cities.
While trapped in the satellite, Cress reads about Thorne’s life and crimes and becomes infatuated by his roguish persona. When she meets him in person, she is very shy, which makes working with Thorne very awkward. When Thorne thinks they are about to be killed by Lunar soldiers, he kisses Cress, her first and only kiss. She later finds out that Thorne is not the hero she believes him to be, but a very flawed young man. She falls more in love with him.
Thorne wins an attractive escort android in a card game so he can provide Iko, Cinder’s android who doesn’t have a body but only a memory chip, with a body. Cress sees the android in his lap and believes her to be a human woman. She runs away upset and crying.
Wolf considers Scarlet his alpha female and the only woman for him. When she is taken by Mira, he becomes enraged and despondent. He refuses to leave Farafrah when the soldiers come, and Cinder has to use her bioelectric ability to force him, something they both hate.
Cinder is in love with Kai, and even though Kai makes decisions that put the welfare of his people first, he has romantic feelings for Cinder as well. Before he kisses her, Kai asks her if she has ever used her ability to manipulate him.
The reader finds out that Levana was married before and, while we don’t know what happened to her first husband, she still wears her wedding ring. She keeps it hidden using a glamour.
If your children have read this book or someone has read it to them, consider these discussion topics:
Have you ever had to make a decision that was morally correct but unpopular? Explain.
How does Cress get through stressful situations?
What does the Bible say about calling on God in prayer when you are in need?
How does Cinder help Wolf after Scarlet is taken?
How should Cinder help Wolf without forcing him to do what she wants him to do?
As an act of vengeance for treating her poorly for so many years, Cinder uses her gift to manipulate her stepmother, Adri, into feeling remorse for how she (Adri) treated her (Cinder). Afterward, Cinder feels guilty about doing it.
How might forgiveness be more powerful than revenge?
Kai asks Cinder if she has ever used her ability to manipulate him, and she tells him she never has and never will. She wonders if she will be able to keep her word.
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