Cinder

Cinder by Marissa Meyer, 390 pages

Cinder is the first book of the Lunar Chronicles and a cyborg adaptation of the classic Cinderella story. Cinder takes place in a city called New Beijing, a capital city of a war torn Earth. Decades of infighting among themselves and against the Lunars (a race of magical people living on the moon) has left the population decimated and parts of the planet unlivable. But a fragile peace has been reached as negotiations with the Lunars continue. However there is also a lethal disease that seems to be both random in who it infects, and completely incurable.

But Cinder doesn't care about any of that. She just wants to continue working at her repair shop and eventually buy her freedom from her legal guardian/owner. See Cinder is a cyborg and has less rights than a regular human. And while her guardian doesn't own her, they do own her non human parts, parts she cannot live without. So being seen as less human than her two step sisters she has to do all the work around the house and is the main source of income for the family. But that all changes when a prince appears in her shop to get a droid repaired and one of her step sisters contracts the disease.

I really liked this adaptation of Cinderella. It manages to hit all of the key elements like step sisters, a ball, magical transformation, princes etc, but is able to retell it in an interesting way. I would even go as far to say this is a modernization that seems applicable not only to todays times, but until cyborgs are actually common, though moon people might be hard to accept.