Book Buzz: Meyer's 'Fairest' delves into evil
In author Marissa Meyer's sci-fi take on fairy-tale characters, only one is the fairest of them all — at least in her antagonistic eyes.
The back story of Queen Levana, the villain of Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles young-adult fantasy series, is finally revealed in the novel Fairest (Macmillan, out Jan. 27). It's a surprise prequel chapter of sorts being added to the five-book series that began with Cinder two years ago and will end in November 2015 with Winter.
"I'm thinking of this book almost as a gift to the readers who have become so involved in the world and the characters: 'Here's this thing you weren't expecting!' " Meyer says of Fairest, which she'll be discussing during a live Google video chat for fans on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET/6 PT.
For her Lunar Chronicle books, Meyer first created cyborg mechanic Linh Cinder out of the Cinderella legend. She then tweaked Red Riding Hood to be a French farm girl and sleuth Scarlet Benoit for Scarlet, took Rapunzel to the moon with Cress' outer-space hacker Crescent Darnel, and introduced Levana's stepdaughter Princess Winter as the Snow White-esque protagonist of the series' final novel.
And for Fairest, Meyer is putting a spin on the Evil Queen from Snow White fame to show how Levana became the kind of woman who would rule the moon colony of Luna and want to take over Earth, too.
"In the fairy tale, she has the mirror, and I did a lot with mirrors and played with that element and that concept of what could make a woman so vain that she would commit unspeakable evil to remain the most beautiful woman in her country?" Meyer says.
"I took all of that from that fairy tale and twisted it to match the world of The Lunar Chronicles."
Fairest begins when Levana is 15 years old and covers about 10 years of her life, ending about a decade before Cinder is set.
For years, Meyer has been telling readers that Levana is psychotic but for good reasons, and the book promises to reveal those as well as delve into her psyche and the factors in her life that led her to want to rule Earth.
When fans first meet her, the author says, "she's showing signs of crazy, but in large part that's because she's grown up in a really poisonous household and she has a very cruel older sister who's been mentally and physically abusive to her her whole life.
"By the time she's 15, she's already having a lot of issues, but it's really at that point in her life that's the first big moments of the book that start her true downward spiral to becoming truly evil."
The origins of Fairest began before Cinder even came out. Macmillan asked Meyer to write a companion story to the series that the publisher could use for promotional purposes, and she was excited about penning Levana's story. But it was only supposed to be 7,000 words, and Meyer felt like her queen deserved more.
Last November during National Novel Writing Month, she decided to finally just write it, with no expectation of it ever being published. A month later, her agent took Fairest to Macmillan and she received "a huge reaction from them," Meyer says.
She blew past the NaNoWriMo 50,000 word-count minimum, too — between Fairest and her revisions of Winter, Meyer wrote a total of 130,000 words in November. "I actually was hosting a contest that if anybody wrote more words than me that month, they could win a prize," she says. "I ended up having 20 people who beat me."
Fairest involves early versions of characters who have been introduced in The Lunar Chronicles, including Cinder and Winter as little children who were born on the moon, plus provides the back story on fugitive scientist Dr. Erland.
One major event also occurs in Fairest that will play a huge role in some of the turning points in the upcoming Winter novel — one reason why Macmillan wanted to release Fairest first.
Fans have thus far been in the dark about who she is and why she's doing the things she's doing. But will they like her more or less after Fairest?
So far, it's been a very polarizing story for the select few who've read it, Meyer says. "Some people are very sympathetic toward her and feel like they really have come to understand and pity her. Other readers are like, 'No, she's frickin' crazy.'
"I personally have always had a great deal of sympathy for her knowing the things she's gone through."