The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

From the critically-acclaimed author of Prince of Thorns and Red Sister comes a chilling new epic fantasy series.

'If you like dark you will love Mark Lawrence. And when the light breaks through and it all makes sense, the contrast is gorgeous' – Robin Hobb

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

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.

• ISBN13: 9780008284756
• Publish Date: 30 April 2020 (first published 21 April 2020)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 4 February 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperVoyager
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 480
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[Alina]

Worldbuilding had a lot of promise and it's the only thing that made me hang in there (also why it got 2 stars, 1.5 of them is for the possibility of that world). It took me 5 months to finish this book... several times I was a breath away from DNF... The story could have been great, but I just could not connect to any of the characters. And after a while I felt it kept dragging and twisting this way and that and just going around in circles, with stuff just piling up with nothing to show for the plot or the story progress. The last few pages made me scream out loud "oh cooome on, give me a break!", it was just too much... action and tension and oh no! and plot twisty twists, my poor suspension of disbelief was completely blown to pieces and there was no way for me to get back into the story. Not for me this one, very disappointing.

[HekArtemis]

I don't know if this is meant to be YA or almost YA or not, but it certainly had a YA feel to it. Certain elements and tropes were just very YAish. Which is fine, but I am not in the right mood for those elements and so a 5 star book didn't give me 5 star enjoyment. This to say, there is nothing wrong with this book, it is a fantastic 5 star book - I just wasn't in the right mood for certain aspects of it, and so I didn't enjoy it as much as it deserved.

When I read BoA I had assumed that Abeth is another planet that humans had travelled to some time in the distant future/past. Someone the other month noted that it was entirely possible that Abeth is actually Earth, aka the Broken Empire, way in the future and the characters of BoA are actually aliens who travelled to Earth in the future/past. And I was left confused and uncertain. This book did not help to clarify things. On the one hand it mentions a certain crossover thingy as having arrived on Abeth, a thing that was certainly from Earth originally, suggesting that Abeth is not Earth. But then some of the myth talk is very Earth, like mention of Jonah and the whale. And while myths could travel from Earth to another planet, of course, in this case it seems to have come from one of the people who weren't from the ships way back. So... no resolution. Sigh.

I am also left confused about those 4 tribes, whether alien or Terran. The Marjals, Hunstas, Gerants, and Quantals. I had assumed that these were literal biological races with biological traits that pass from one generation to the next. But in this book it seems like they just randomly pop up unexpectedly in various families. Like Yaz is a Quantal and her brother is Hunsta or whatever the fast ones are, but their parents are none of the four? How does this work? I don't know, it's weird anyway.

I look forward to the next book. Especially with that cliffhanging ending.