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  • The Girl and the Stars

  • The Book of the Ice, Book 1
  • Written by: Mark Lawrence
  • Narrated by: Helen Duff
  • Length: 18 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (42 ratings)

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The Girl and the Stars

Written by: Mark Lawrence
Narrated by: Helen Duff
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Publisher's Summary

A stunning new epic fantasy series following a young outcast who must fight with everything she has to survive, set in the same world as Red Sister.

In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz's people call it the Pit of the Missing, and now it is drawing her in as she has always known it would.

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's difference tears her 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 that the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people can be challenged.

©2020 Mark Lawrence (P)2020 Penguin Audio

What listeners say about The Girl and the Stars

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

The Weakest Mark Lawrence I've Read

I've loved Mark Lawrence's work since I first discovered Prince of Thorns. He has shown he can write nuanced protagonists and memorable side characters along with fantastic world building. The world building is here, the rest is not. Yaz feels like one of a million teen girl protagonists, perhaps made worse because Nona Grey existed in this same world and felt so alive and rich. I struggled to care much about any of the characters or the weird love triangle (square? there's a fourth randomly sometimes in there sometimes not). I wanted to love this as much as Grey Sister and the rest of the Book of the Ancestor, but it just didn't do it.

The prose is still great, Lawrence still works his magic with descriptions, I just felt disappointed by this

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

shrug

I'm not really sure how to feel on this one. it wasn't bad per say but there wasn't anything solid for me.

I will say that opening line was amazing.

I was really excited at the start of this novel because it felt a little Inuit inspired and I was really looking forward to seeing where that would go. So as it moved on and revealed less and less about anything Inuit and more about space travelers ending up in an ice ball world. I grew less and less interested. the mix of future tech lost and magic was interesting. But in the end i was left shrugging as the novel concluded without any real conclusions.

i doubt i will continue the series.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Loved it

If you listened to Mark Lawrence's series "Books of the Ancestor" (Red Sister) then you will enjoy this one as well. Takes place in the same universe as the other books. Narrator is perfect (and I am very picky about my narrators).

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Yawn

I tried several time as I enjoyed previous books. Implausible is no problem but I could not buy into the characters. Y A

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

97% Loved it. Ending disappointed a little.

loved the accent and voices, performance was superb. Story was intriguing and grew in complexity at a good rate, keeping things chugging along and the stakes rising.

Was a little let down by the ending, but all in all I would still recommend and will be picking up the sequel. 👍

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Helen Duff for the win!

Amazing narrating, I loved Helen's voice and pacing for this story. As a Canadian that s winter story felt both familiar and forgiven in its magicalness.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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  • J
  • 2024-05-29

Slow Start, Strong Ending

I read the Book of the Ancestor trilogy prior to reading this novel, and I would recommend reading that trilogy first. If you’re like me, you’ll love finding out some of Abeth’s secrets when you dive into this story. I did find the beginning of this novel a little slow, possibly since I already new about the world, Abeth, where the story takes place, but it does pick up speed by the halfway point. By the story’s end I did feel connected to several of the characters and was invested in their future.

One thing that did occasionally pull me out of the novel was the confusing narration, not Helen Duff, she’s great, I’m referring to the point of view in which the story is told. At times the point of view appears to be an omniscient narrator as technology is properly describe even though the main character, Yaz, wouldn’t know the words for the things she is seeing. For example, the narrator describes a piece of technology by stating it had springs, chains, and wheels. However, one chapter later when Yaz comes across cables, the narrator struggles to describe this new ‘thing’ that Yaz is holding for the first time in her life. This left me confused about who the narrator was.

Helen Duff was a great narrator. She was able to have different voices for most of the characters. She voiced men and women decently. Her voice for a male character named Erris was fantastic. My only complaint is when she said the name “Theus” it somehow, impossibly, frequently sounded like “fierce.”

I will be starting the sequel novel soon.

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