Scarlet

What's inside (9 sections)

1. A Farm With No Grandmother
2. The Fighter in the Back Room
3. Prison Break With Captain Thorne
4. The Emperor Who Has to Marry
5. The Train to Paris
6. Where the Threads Meet
7. What Worked for Me and What Dragged
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I came to this one straight after Cinder, mostly because that metal foot on the palace stairs would not leave my head. I wanted to know where a wanted cyborg goes after she steals a prison hover and flies off with a personality chip in her pocket. Scarlet surprised me by starting somewhere else entirely, on a small farm in France with a girl in a red hoodie arguing with the police. It took me about fifty pages to stop missing New Beijing. By page one hundred I was checking the clock to steal another chapter.

The book came out in 2013 from Feiwel and Friends, 454 pages in the hardcover, and it is the second volume in The Lunar Chronicles. Meyer retells Little Red Riding Hood here, but she keeps the Cinder plot running too. So you get two threads that braid together near the end. One follows Scarlet Benoit hunting for her missing grandmother. The other follows Cinder breaking out of prison with a new cellmate who talks too much. Emperor Kai gets squeezed between them, trying to avoid a wedding that could hand Earth to Queen Levana.

Scarlet Benoit is eighteen and running a farm alone. She lives outside Rieux, a small town in the south of France. Her grandmother, Michelle Benoit, has been gone for two weeks. No note. A ship missing from the hangar. Scarlet has filed reports and shouted at a police officer who keeps telling her that adults walk off all the time. Michelle raised her, taught her to fly and to shoot, and kept the farm accounts in a paper ledger when the portscreen fails.

Scarlet hauls crates to the tavern in town, argues about prices, fixes a busted irrigation line. She wears a red hoodie that used to belong to her father, the hood frayed, the pockets full of twist ties and a folding knife. She sleeps badly. One night she falls asleep at the kitchen table with the police case number glowing on her screen.

What hooked me early was how stubborn Scarlet is. She is not clever in the Cinder way, all wires and code. She is physical. She pushes. When a neighbor suggests Michelle probably went to visit friends in Toulouse, Scarlet snaps. When the cops will not look at the signs of a struggle in the hangar, she photographs them herself.

A Farm With No Grandmother

Michelle is not a sweet background granny. She is ex military, a former pilot for the European forces, strong hands, short gray hair, a habit of locking doors twice. Scarlet remembers her hiding a gun in a flour tin and teaching her how to strip and clean it. There are gaps in her story that Scarlet never pressed. Why did Michelle retire to a farm. Who was Scarlet's grandfather. Why does Michelle get tense whenever Luna comes up on the news.

Scarlet finds small things that do not fit. Michelle's ID chip is gone from the house system. Her favorite coat is still there, which bothers Scarlet more than anything. A woman who always dresses for weather would not leave without it. Then there is the case of a missing man from Paris, Logan Tanner, whose disappearance gets linked on conspiracy feeds to the same dates. Scarlet clings to that thread because the police will not.

I lost some sleep here. The opening has that itch of a true missing person case, where you check timestamps and bus tickets and feel angry on Scarlet's behalf.

A short detour that matters later. Michelle once saved a small Lunar child and hid her on Earth. The book does not dump this at the start. It leaks out through a scratched ID chip, a pilot's log, a memory Scarlet half recalls of her grandmother crying over news from Luna years ago. When it lands, it reframes Michelle from a victim into someone who made a dangerous choice long ago and paid for it now.

The Fighter in the Back Room

Wolf enters at the Rieux tavern, where Scarlet delivers produce and hears about illegal fights in the basement. She goes down to ask questions about her grandmother, because one of the last pings from Michelle's ship was near town and because desperate people ask in bars.

The fight room is low, damp, loud. Men circle on mats while bets move on portscreens. Wolf is the fighter no one wants to face. Early twenties, tall, lean muscle, messy brown hair, green eyes that catch light oddly. A curved scar cuts across his cheek. He fights barehanded, fast, almost gentle until he is not. He lets opponents swing first. Then he puts them down with a kind of ease that makes the crowd nervous.

Scarlet notices two things. He does not fight for money, not really. And he stares at her red hoodie a second too long.

After the fight, Wolf offers to help her find Michelle. He says he hears things. He walks her home through dark fields, carrying her empty crates without asking. He eats three of her tomatoes like apples, juice running down his chin, and asks for more. He remembers the exact curve of the road. He is charming in a rough, unfinished way, all half sentences and sudden smiles.

Ran is there too, watching from the edge of the crowd. Ran is leaner, colder, with a laugh that stops conversation. He fights dirty, elbows and knees, and he seems to enjoy hurting. He calls Wolf brother, but not in a warm way. More like ownership. He tells Scarlet she should not trust stray dogs. The line stuck with me because at the time it reads like bar talk. Later it reads like a warning label.

Scarlet should be careful. She is not. Grief makes her reckless, and Wolf is useful. He knows the back roads and who moves stolen ships. He also fixes her broken pump with his hands, no tools, strength that bends metal a little too easily. Scarlet files that away and does not ask.

Prison Break With Captain Thorne

Cinder's thread picks up in a New Beijing prison cell, and the tone shifts hard. Where Scarlet's chapters smell of earth and rain, Cinder's smell of disinfectant and recycled air.

Cinder is locked up after the ball, exposed as cyborg and Lunar, wanted by Levana and by the Commonwealth for escape. Her power cell runs low. Guards watch her on camera. Dr Erland, who told her she is really Princess Selene, cannot visit openly. He slips her what help he can through coded messages.

Then a voice comes through the wall. Carswell Thorne.

Thorne is nineteen or twenty, American, a former cadet who deserted and stole a military spacecraft called the Rampion. He jokes constantly and flirts with cameras. Under the jokes he is scared.

Cinder breaks out first using her new grasp of Lunar control, the ability to push at the bioelectric field of people around her and bend what they see. It hurts to use. Her interface glitches, vision blurs, nose bleeds. She makes a guard see an empty cell, slips past, then doubles back for Thorne because he knows where his ship is parked in the desert outside the city and because she cannot fly a spacecraft alone with a dying battery.

The escape is messy. No clean vents. They crawl, they run, they steal uniforms that do not fit. Thorne gets hit on the head and his vision goes strange for days, which matters when he has to pilot. Iko, reduced to a personality chip after Adri sold her body in the last book, rides in Cinder's pocket. Erland arranges a brief gap in patrols. They take a prison hover and lift off in the Rampion while alarms scream.

The Rampion is old, held together by patches and Thorne's confidence. Iko gets installed as the ship's companion, thrilled to have walls again. Thorne tries to charm Cinder and fails in a way that made me laugh. He offers her a blanket, then asks if Lunar princesses eat regular food.

The Emperor Who Has to Marry

Kai is Emperor now. His father died of letumosis at the end of Cinder, and the crown landed on a nineteen year old who still fumbles with state dinners.

Queen Levana sits in orbit with warships and a smile. She wants marriage to Kai, public and soon, to join Luna and Earth. Everyone on Kai's council knows it is blackmail. If he refuses, she will release plague or strike cities from orbit. If he agrees, she will rule through him and kill dissent quietly with glamour and fear. His advisor Torin, loyal and gray, tells him to stall without looking weak.

Kai tries. He announces an engagement to calm markets, then drags on dates and asks for troop withdrawals as a show of good faith. Levana answers with broadcasts where she weeps about peace while her thaumaturges stand behind her in red robes. People are scared. Some want the wedding just to avoid war.

Levana also demands Cinder. She calls her a murderer and a danger to Earthen homes. She wants the cyborg girl delivered in chains. Kai's guards hunt for Cinder while Kai privately hopes she stays gone. He remembers dancing with her at the ball and that she saw through Levana's glamour to the scarred woman under it.

The pressure builds to a date. Levana picks a date for the wedding. Kai agrees because he sees no move left. It feels like watching someone agree to step into a cage to keep others out of it.

The Train to Paris

Back in France, Scarlet follows her only solid lead. Michelle's old chip points to Paris, to an address tied to Logan Tanner. Wolf says he will take her.

They board a maglev train north, rain on windows, vendors selling noodles. Scarlet brings her grandmother's gun and a canvas bag. Wolf brings almost nothing. He watches the doors.

Halfway there, the attack comes.

Men board at a small station, quiet, hooded, moving like they share one mind. Ran is with them. They do not rob passengers. They come straight for Scarlet's car. What happens next is fast and ugly. Wolf changes. His eyes go odd, his teeth show too sharp, strength that was strange on the farm becomes impossible. He tears a seat from its bolts to block the aisle. He takes a knife in the shoulder and keeps moving. Scarlet fires her gun and misses more than she hits, ears ringing, hands shaking.

Meyer writes the fight in close bursts. A hand on her wrist. Glass cracking. A conductor shouting to stay down. Blood on a plastic tray table. Ran laughs through it, calling Wolf by his real name, Ze'ev, calling him a pet who forgot his leash. Wolf begs Scarlet to run while he holds them off, and for a moment his voice sounds layered, as if someone else speaks through him.

Scarlet does not run far. She cannot leave him. That choice, loyal and stupid, defines her.

After, in a shaking train bathroom while Wolf bleeds, the truth spills. Wolf is Lunar. As a child he and his brother Ran were taken and altered into wolf soldiers, built to obey thaumaturges and to fight without fear. The tattoos are pack marks. He was sent to Earth to hunt. He was ordered to find Michelle Benoit and through her find Selene.

Scarlet holds the gun between them and asks if he killed her grandmother. He says no. Sybil Mira, Levana's thaumaturge on Earth, has Michelle in Paris and wants Scarlet as bait. He was supposed to deliver her.

Sybil is cold where Levana is showy. She controls the pack with a thought. When she speaks through Wolf on the train, Scarlet feels the room tilt. It is the first time Scarlet understands Lunar glamour, the ability to press on minds and make people see what you want.

Paris is gray and crowded. Scarlet and Wolf track the address to a plain building. Inside are holding cells and screens showing farm satellite photos. Michelle was there. A pilot's log says Michelle flew Selene to Earth as a baby and watched surgeons rebuild the burned child into a cyborg to hide her.

Michelle's end is brutal. Sybil questions her about Selene's location. Michelle gives nothing she does not have to. She dies off page. Scarlet learns it from a guard's comment and from Wolf's face. She sits on a concrete floor and cannot get up for a while.

Where the Threads Meet

Cinder and Thorne land the Rampion outside Paris with a busted stabilizer and little fuel. They followed Erland's tip that Michelle Benoit might know how to prove Cinder's identity. They find a farm girl with a gun who thinks Cinder is a trick.

It should feel forced, four fugitives colliding in a warehouse. For me it mostly worked because everyone wants something different. Scarlet wants her grandmother alive. Wolf wants out of Sybil's grip. Cinder wants a way to stop Levana without getting Kai killed. Thorne wants to keep his ship.

Ran forces the union. He and the pack hit the warehouse at night, with Sybil behind them pressing control. Wolf faces Ran while Scarlet screams at both to stop. Ran is stronger and fully given over. Wolf is torn, hearing Sybil in his skull and Scarlet in his ears. He chooses Scarlet. Ran dies when Cinder turns his momentum against him.

They lift off with sirens rising from Paris streets, with Levana's wedding date ticking on every feed, with Kai still on Earth preparing to marry to buy time. The crew is set. A cyborg princess, a thief pilot, a farm girl, a broken wolf soldier, and a chatty ship.

What Worked for Me and What Dragged

The split story is both the strength and the snag. I tore through it because there is always a hook before a slow patch. Scarlet in danger, cut to Cinder in prison, cut to Kai signing a paper he hates. That rhythm keeps pages turning on a tired evening. But it also means neither Scarlet nor Cinder gets the full focus Cinder had in book one. Just as I settled into the farm, I was yanked to orbit. Just as Thorne made me laugh, I was back on a train with dread pooling in my stomach. Readers who want one steady line may feel seasick. I did, twice, around the middle.

Scarlet herself carried a lot for me. She charges doors and keeps shooting after she misses. Her love for Michelle feels lived in, built from laundry and ledgers rather than speeches. Wolf charmed me too, though I wish Meyer had slowed their bond. They go from strangers to devotion in days, under extreme stress, with mind control in the mix. The train confession helps. His shame feels honest.

Thorne almost steals the book. His jokes during the escape gave me room to breathe. Once or twice he cracked wise while others bled and I wanted him to shut up.

Levana remains thin here. Menace without motive beyond power and vanity. Sybil fills some of that gap, but she too is mostly cold orders. Kai's chapters add weight, his guilt over his father and his memory of dancing with a girl who left a foot on the stairs.

Small gripes that stuck. The Paris building is sketched lightly after such careful farm work. Some technology bends when the plot needs it, especially how easily the Rampion hides. And the final warehouse fight, while tense, leans on Cinder's new power spiking exactly when needed.

Still, I closed the book fast and ordered the next one. The image that stays is not the wedding or the wolves. It is Scarlet in her red hoodie asleep against Wolf's shoulder in a stolen ship, gun still in her hand, trusting him despite proof she should not. It is Cinder checking her charge level and choosing to fly toward danger rather than away. For a middle book, that pull forward is the job, and this one does it.

Friends who ask if teens can handle it should know there is more blood here than in Cinder. Fistfights, knife wounds, a torture death off page, mind control that reads as assault, and a grieving granddaughter who does not get a clean goodbye. Romance stays at kissing and holding, language mild. I would hand it to thirteen and up without worry, younger if they handled book one well.

FAQ

Is Scarlet the second book in The Lunar Chronicles?

Yes, Scarlet is book two in The Lunar Chronicles, published in 2013 by Feiwel and Friends. It follows Cinder and leads into Cress.

Who is Wolf really?

Wolf is Ze'ev Kesley, a Lunar wolf soldier altered as a child and controlled by Thaumaturge Sybil Mira. He was sent to track Michelle Benoit and Scarlet but turns against his pack.

Do I need to read Cinder before Scarlet?

You should, because Cinder's prison escape with Thorne and Kai's wedding pressure continue directly from book one. Scarlet's search in France makes sense alone, but the ending joins both crews.