In a New Beijing crowded with humans and androids, sixteen-year-old Linh Cinder is the city's best mechanic and one of its least valued citizens. She is a cyborg, salvaged after an accident she cannot remember, and under Eastern Commonwealth law she belongs to her stepmother, Linh Adri, who resents every hour of her existence. Only her younger stepsister Peony and Iko, the household android with a faulty personality chip, treat her as a person.
Two things arrive at Cinder's market booth in the same week: Crown Prince Kai, carrying an android he needs repaired and asking no questions about who she is, and letumosis, the plague that has been emptying the city for years. When the disease reaches her own household, Adri volunteers Cinder for the palace's cyborg draft — a research programme nobody survives. What the court scientist Dr. Dmitri Erland finds in her instead is an immunity that should not exist.
As the dying emperor's court manoeuvres against Queen Levana of Luna, whose people can bend what others see and who wants the Commonwealth through marriage or through war, Cinder finds her own history bound up in the outcome. Marissa Meyer's 2012 debut opens The Lunar Chronicles by reassembling Cinderella as science fiction: the stepmother, the sister, the ball and the abandoned shoe are all present, and every one of them means something different by the end.