104 pages • 3 hours read
Marissa MeyerCinder
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Cinder is a cyborg—part human, part machine—living in a futuristic New Beijing. Technology appears everywhere, from ID scanners embedded in every human, cyborg, or android, to netscreens that communicate a variety of information from news to gossip. Cinder’s cyborg status offers her a perspective ideal for her work as a mechanic. In fact, she is known as the best and sole full-service mechanic at the weekly market. Although skilled in her trade, Cinder hides any evidence of her cyborg parts due the undervaluing and shunning of her kind.
At the weekly market, Cinder, as usual, covers her steel left hand and mechanical leg and foot with work gloves, cargo pants, and boots. Sitting behind the table at her booth, Cinder replaces a snug and uncomfortable foot she wore for four years with an improved replacement. However, immediately after the removal and placement of the old foot on her worktable, a young man, hooded for disguise, arrives at her booth with the request to fix an old android. This is Prince Kaito, son of the emperor. Looking for Linh Cinder, and surprised that Cinder is not an old man, he speaks to her with informality and humor: “He wasn’t the first to voice surprise. Most of her customers couldn’t fathom how a teenage girl could be the best mechanic in the city, and she never broadcast the reason for her talent” (10).
During their conversation and Cinder’s agreement to attempt to fix Nainsi, the android, Iko—Cinder’s android assistant—returns with a new foot for Cinder. Desperate to keep Prince Kai from knowing that the foot is for Cinder, she creates a cover story, all while balancing on one human foot. After Prince Kai leaves, the most feared threat strikes the market: a person is diagnosed with the plague. This particular person—Chang Sacha, a baker—despises Cinder for what she is, initially telling her son to stay away from Cinder’s booth. At the conclusion of the chapter, Cinder and Iko are left hiding in the booth, attempting to avoid exposure to Chang Sacha and the plague.
Chapter 2 Summary
Once it becomes known that Chang Sacha is afflicted with plague, everyone flees from the market square. The emergency protocol unfolds; Chang Sacha is removed and the booth is burned. In order to escape quarantine, Cinder and Iko sneak away from their booth and the market, Prince Kai’s android in hand. The two walk home among streets with apartment buildings packed closely together. New Beijing Palace, home to Prince Kai, is the only area in the city with any remaining space. After first stopping in the basement where Cinder’s workshop is located and dropping off the android, Cinder and Iko leave the chicken wire storage space for their home on the eighteenth floor of the apartment building.
Cinder and Iko enter to Cinder’s stepmother, Adri, overseeing the dress-fittings of Cinder’s stepsisters, Pearl and Peony. Both wear beautiful tulle and silk; Adri informs Cinder to find her own dress if she wishes to attend. In addition to finding and paying for her own dress, Cinder must also fix the hover with a new magbelt, ensuring transportation to the ball. Part of Cinder’s cyborg makeup includes a retina display that alerts her to various information, such as her physiological status and when someone is lying. The blink of an orange light indicates Adri’s lie; Cinder will not attend the ball.
An announcement on the netscreen interrupts the scene. Prince Kai discusses the letumosis, or plague, outbreak and the continued search for a vaccine. Containment of the disease is crucial for all of the Eastern Commonwealth. Finding a cure for letumosis extends to a personal level for Prince Kai, as it threatens to claim his father, Imperial Majesty Emperor Rikan.
Adri resents Cinder; this feeling stems from the death of her late husband, Garan, who was afflicted with letumosis while in Europe, where he adopted Cinder: “Hundreds of thousands of people had fallen ill, suffered, died. Even Adri’s husband had contracted it on a trip to Europe—the same trip during which he’d agreed to become the guardian of an eleven-year-old orphaned cyborg” (26).
Chapter 3 Summary
Cinder and Iko return to the workshop in the basement. Iko is unaware of Adri’s lie about Cinder going to the ball. Iko’s personality chip translates to a blend of android logic combined with a love of fashion, balls, romance, and Cinder. Cinder informs Iko that due to both her lack of funds for a dress and the likelihood of Adri adding task after task to Cinder’s must-do-before-the-ball list, she will not attend.
Preparing for a trip to the junkyard for a magbelt, Cinder and Iko discuss better uses for money—tools, a toolbox, or an apartment for the two to share—all of which are more appealing than a ball gown. Before leaving, Cinder’s younger stepsister and sole human friend, Peony, joins them, still in her dress. She offers a gift to Iko, an acknowledgment that Cinder deserves a beautiful dress, too, and a portscreen she needs Cinder to fix. Learning of Cinder and Iko’s trip to the junkyard, Peony requests to accompany them, after she changes out of her gown.
Chapter 4 Summary
During their search at the junkyard, Iko and Cinder look for a magbelt while Peony insists on knowing the details of Cinder’s encounter with Prince Kai. Like most girls, Peony enjoys an infatuation—or obsession— with the prince. As Peony alternates between hating Cinder for meeting the prince without her and fantasizing about dancing with him at the ball—a move that offers the additional benefit of irritating her older sister, Pearl—she realizes that Cinder also finds the prince handsome. Cinder neither openly confirms nor denies her own feelings for the prince.
Peony continues her romantic dreaming, adding that one of Prince Kai’s goals for the ball is to find a bride. As the trio converses, Iko discovers a hover with a magbelt still inside, and Cinder puts her mechanic skills to work, scavenging the item. Magbelt in hand, they make a new discovery: an ancient, gasoline-powered car. Cinder views this car as the possible escape vehicle for her and Iko, leaving behind New Beijing and their undesirable circumstances.
While Cinder examines the gasoline car, Peony discusses a rumor about Prince Kai marrying Queen Levana of Luna, a union based on politics, not love. Another non-human species living on the moon, those on earth fear Lunars and their magical abilities: “Their unnatural power had made [Lunars] a greedy and violent race, and Queen Levana was the worst of all of them” (43). Greed moves Queen Levana to remove family members—permanently—in the way of her goal of the throne. This includes killing her niece, Princess Selene.
The fear Cinder feels at the thought of Lunars and the potential match between Prince Kai and Queen Levana is eclipsed with the notice of a spot on Peony’s collarbone. This is not a grease stain or smudge; rather, Peony’s spot marks the beginning of letumosis.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The tale of Cinderella meets a new setting full of technology and fear of a deadly plague, culminating in a myriad of both familiar and new obstacles for Cinder. As a cyborg, a blend of human and machine, Cinder feels the family and societal rejection due to being part of a misinterpreted and shunned class. Despite the many cyborg-related drawbacks, Cinder uses her personal experience with machines to refine her skill and acclaim as a talented mechanic.
Similar to Cinderella’s family predicament, Cinder lives with a stepmother, Adri, and two stepsisters, Pearl and Peony. Adri and Pearl never miss a chance to communicate their disdain for Cinder, and make frequent jabs at her cyborg qualities. Cinder remains trapped in the household because she is a legal ward of Ari’s, as well as the only income provider of the household:
She might have pointed out that, as she was the one doing the work, the money should have been hers to spend as [Cinder] saw fit. But all arguments would come to nothing. Legally, Cinder belonged to Adri as much as the household android and so too did her money, her few possessions, even the new foot she’d just attached (24).
Paralleling the classic tale, an upcoming ball with a handsome prince in attendance further highlights the devaluing of Cinder compared to her stepsisters. Pearl and Peony receive new dresses—purchased with money earned by Cinder—but Cinder cannot attend the ball without meeting Adri’s stipulations. First, Adri demands Cinder to purchase her own dress. Second, like Cinderella and her endless household tasks, Cinder must fix the hover so Adri, Pearl, and Peony have transportation to the ball. Due to Cinder’s ability to detect lies—a feature of her cyborg technology—she knows Adri holds no truth in allowing Cinder to attend the ball.
Unaware to Adri, Cinder meets Prince Kai at the weekly market, hidden under the hoodie of his sweatshirt. Like Cinder, who hides her machine hand and leg with gloves, pants, and boots, Prince Kai desires to keep his identity a secret, but for much different reasons. Prince Kai is adored; Cinder is despised.
Adri’s requirement of a fixed magbelt leads to Cinder, her android friend, Iko, and stepsister and friend, Peony, to the junkyard. Unlike in “Cinderella,” Peony treats Cinder with both love and respect, which is reciprocated by Cinder. This mutual care makes the realization of plague symptoms on Peony—spots of letumosis—particularly difficult.
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