The Girl And The Stars by Mark Lawrence – Book Review

PUBLISHERS BLURB 

East of the Black Rock, out on the ice, lies a hole down which broken children are thrown.

On the vastness of the ice there is no room for individuals. No one survives alone.

To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is different.

Torn from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her life with, Yaz has to carve a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of danger.

Beneath the ice, Yaz will learn that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined.

She will learn that her weaknesses are another kind of strength. And she will learn to challenge the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people.

Only when it’s darkest can you see the stars.

MY REVIEW 

Set in the same universe as The Book Of The Ancestor series (Red Sister being one of my favourite fantasy novels), this is the tale of Yaz.

Yaz is a broken child, at 16 she is headed for the gathering and is expecting to be thrown into the pit with the other broken children. But, when her brother, Zeen is thrown down and she is spared, she jumps after him……

Here she finds another world, with survivors of the drop, a society that has been there for years. But Zeen is nowhere to be found……..so she sets out to find her little brother..

This is a tale of ice and cold, of magic, of stars in the darkness. 

It has cannibals, black ice that taints others, of corruption and power, but it’s also about a young girl accepting her ability to tap into the river is not a weakness, but strength. Can she save Zeen?

I love this book. Yaz is a great character, full of doubts but also determination to do what’s right. I loved being back on Abeth, with mentions of the places from Red Sister, but also very different as this is life on the ice and below it. For me it had a sense of wonder and atmosphere that reminded me of when I read The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin many years ago…..but this is very different, with fantastic world building, great characters and a wonderful plot…..and that end!!! Utterly brilliant.

Thank you to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour,  for the promotional materials and a free copy of the book. This is my honest, unbiased review.

 

You can buy a copy here: https://amzn.to/3bNEGaT 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme. Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy, and both The Liar’s Key and The Wheel of Osheim have won the Gemmell Legend award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Brist