Thank goodness I'm done with this novel. 
 For a while, it seemed like a retelling of Mockingjay (which I didn't like) rather than a retelling of any fairy tale. Although I did find myself at a couple of points being pulled through the action with an elevated heart rate, the action was so disjointed that the effect was like someone driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. There were so many twists, turns, and false starts that I had trouble keeping track of who was where and who knew what about whom. Apparently Meyer (and her editors) did, too; at least once I noticed that a character knew something about another character that she couldn't have known. ((view spoiler)[Cress, Iko, Cinder, Thorne, and Jacin were far away from the lumber sector and had only seen a video with no sound showing people---including Winter---with signs of letumosis. They also saw Scarlet, whom they recognized by the red hooded sweatshirt she wore pulled up over her head. They didn't know at that point that Scarlet also had letumosis, yet when Cress meets up with Kai in the palace (p 637), she somehow knows that Scarlet is also sick. I went back several times to try and see where she got this information, but I can find nothing. (hide spoiler)]) 
 If an author and her editors don't care enough to spot and correct inconsistencies and weird ("listed her head"), incorrect ("providence of luck" (p. 590)), or trite ("shatter the vase into a hundred tiny pieces." (p. 470)) use of language, I feel less inclined to put forth the effort necessary to read the novel. If it's not worth their time, why should it be worth mine? 
 Once again, we have these "strong" female characters with weak resolve and almost no confidence. Even after success upon success upon success, these women continue to seek the approval of men before they do anything. Well, anything except what's necessary to save said men, which they succeed at (of course, because this is the kind of novel in which none of the main characters can die. That might have been a spoiler, but if you've read this far in this review, you probably don't care) and then immediately go back to getting weak and swoony about the boy the novel has assigned them. "Oh, I don't know if I can do this without the guy! I can hardly even stand on my weak little knees without him to lean on! Wait! He's in danger! Suddenly I know how to use this weapon I was too weak to wield two lines ago, and I use it with precision although I've had no practice! There! I saved him! But oh! My legs are collapsing and my mind is unhinged because I'm so weak on my own!" 
 When retelling a fairy tale, an author has the freedom to adjust the themes in the original fairy tale. Meyer seems a little too tied to the fairy tale to allow her characters---male and female---to break from it, and her story suffers for it. 
 And the ending. Ugh, the tedium! I almost gave up on the book thirty pages from the end, it was so boring. Endings are hard to stick, I know, and perhaps especially so when you're trying to get it to align with the ending of a story that's been well-known for generations, but this really needed more work before it hit the presses. 
 The moral of the story for me: either don't read YA, even when my kids ask me to, or only review it if it's one of the rare novels in the genre that's not just the literary equivalent of cotton candy. And always, always get it from the library.