Thoughts on : The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence
The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence
Genre : Fantasy
Series : Book of the Ice, book 1
About the Book :
On Abeth the vastness of the ice holds no room for individuals. Survival together is barely possible. 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 not the same.
Yaz is torn from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of difference and mystery and danger.
Yaz learns that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined. She learns that her weaknesses are another kind of strength. And she learns to challenge the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people.
I’m a huge fan of the Book of the Ancestors series by Mark Lawrence, which is one of (if not the only?) series where I’ve rated all books 5 stars. So I was really excited to return to the world of Abeth, even though I knew I would miss Nona.
Unfortunately, The Girl and the Stars didn’t quite click for me. It’s not a bad book at all, it just didn’t bring me the same depth of emotions that Red Sister and its sequels did.
A huge part of it is the characters. Other than Yaz, most of them felt two dimensional and I never got to know them and connect with them, meaning I didn’t care as much about their fate as I should have. But even Yaz felt a bit underdeveloped. Something about it felt very YA, with the powerful, brave, stubborn, unstoppable girl main character – and I don’t mean anything bad by it, as I have read and loved lots of YA books! It just wasn’t what I was expecting here.
I still love this world. Everything we discover about it in this new series is fascinating to me, and I enjoyed how we got to revisit some aspects of it too. But the pace was so fast, it’s action from start to finish, that I felt I barely got to enjoy it.
This book definitely had its ups and downs, but even though I was a bit disappointed, I plan to continue on with the series as I really enjoy Mark Lawrence’s writing. Plus, that cliffhanger! I just need to know what happens next.
