I wasn't too fond of Scarlet mostly because I though Scarlet Benoit's personality is exactly like Cinder's, which makes her seem like a redundant character. I also didn't like Scarlet because the romance between Scarlet and Wolf seemed pretty unrealistic to me. But enough about Scarlet. Let's talk about Cress. 
 Cress was a pretty big improvement from Cinder and Scarlet. The characters are all starting to tie in together, and the entire book builds up towards (what I'm hoping will be) an epic finale in Winter. 
 As you may have guessed from the cover, Cress is a retelling of Rapunzel, where Crescent Moon Darnel (or just Cress for short) is forced to live in isolation in a satellite in order to serve the lunar queen by monitoring Earth, among other things. When she comes into contact with Cinder and her crew, they arrange for a mission to retrieve Cress from the satellite. Of course, things take a turn for the worse, and Cress and Thorne end up stranded in a desert. 
 I liked Cress. She's cute and has a naive and childish personality, which made her a refreshing change from Cinder and Scarlet. 
 Her relationship with Thorne is also way more convincing than the relationship between Scarlet and Wolf, or even Cinder and Kai. Unfortunately, I can't help feeling like Thorne is kind of a pedophile... how old is he anyways? Because all I can picture is Colin O'Donoghue as Carswell Thorne and Chloe Grace Moretz as Cress - the image of them together is a bit unsettling, but maybe I'm the only one who feels this way. 
 Also, Iko is starting to grow on me. I found her extremely likable in Cress. She's, hands down, the most interesting character in the series.