Cinder

A popular trope in fantasy is the revival of fairytales, with a twist. You only have to go to the cinema and watching Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Huntsmen, and Hansel and Gretel to see your childhood favorites get the sex and drugs and rock'n'roll treatment. Marissa Meyer brings this contemporary fairytale spin to science fiction with her science fiction, robot, and romance novel Cinder. This Cinder panders to no female stereotype, and instead of being a pitiful servant, she is a gifted mechanic, and a cyborg. She's still considered a second-class citizen and treated like rubbish by her stepmother, but she fights back against this treatment. Life becomes dangerous, complicated, and finally interesting for Cinder when she meets the handsome Prince Kai. Her journey is one of discovery through her own past, and a struggle between duty and freedom, and it's up to our heroine to save Earth. Aside from the fresh life in this well-known tale, the New Beijing that Meyer creates is a bustling, vibrant world of humans and androids, and an Earth ravaged by a terrible plague. One of the key sources of enjoyment I had from this novel was the stark difference it posed to the western worlds so popular in sci-fi and dystopias. Even if you're not a fairytale fan, there's enough action and technology in this novel to keep diehard sci-fi fans happy.