The fate of the world hangs from the Moon.
The green world overwhelms all of Yaz’s expectations. Everything seems different but some things remain the same: her old enemies are still bent on her destruction.
The Corridor abounds with plenty and unsuspected danger. To stand a chance against the eyeless priest, Eular, and the god-like city-mind, Seus, Yaz will need to learn fast and make new friends.
The Convent of Sweet Mercy, like the Corridor itself, is packed with peril and opportunity. Yaz needs the nuns’ help – but first they want to execute her.
The fate of everyone squeezed between the Corridor’s vast walls, and ultimately the fate of those labouring to survive out on ice itself, hangs from the moon, and the battle to save the moon centres on the Ark of the Missing, buried beneath the emperor’s palace. Everyone wants Yaz to be the key that will open the Ark – the one the wise have sought for generations. But sometimes wanting isn’t enough.
My Review
The Girl and the Moon is the final instalment in The Book of the Ice series. As such I will be referring to events that have happened previously. If you haven’t read this series yet and want to, then please come back to this review at a later date. For those us who have had to wait a little while Mark has a mini catch up at the beginning of the book. I love this in books, there is nothing more tedious than characters going over previous events.
The Story
The priests of black rock have been defeated and Yaz has made it to the corridor. The last book left us on one hell of a cliff hanger and I’ve been desperate to see how this would all end. I was not disappointed.
Yaz and crew are in peril from the moment we start, this book is so tense in places my heart would actually race. I’ve become very attached to these characters, they’ve grown so much, especially Yaz, that seeing them in harms way hurts. However, this is Mark Lawrence so you know it’s not going to be an easy ride.
With help from the nuns at Sweet Mercy, they have to find their way in this strange new land to restore the ark. There are so many twists and turns along the way and I could not see how it was all going to come together until the very end.
As per the other books, the chapters are told from different perspectives. This works really well to see what is happening in multiple places at a given time. It also makes you want to keep reading and for chunky books they are easy to fly through.
World Building and Writing
The continued world building was so complex and enthralling. I loved how the stories between the two trilogies weave together. I want to go back and start again from Red Sister to find all those subtle moments I missed the first time around.
The writing in this book, especially towards the end is beautiful. So many quotable lines said by Erris and I loved how a line near the end said to Mali, is said to Nona at the end of Holy Sister. It was a wonderful way to tie the two stories together.
Final Thoughts
Mark Lawrence is one of my favourite fantasy authors and this trilogy has just cemented that. He writes phenomenal characters, especially female ones, complex stories and beautiful world building.
Unfortunately, every story must come to an end and Yaz’s is over. For me, I am heading back to the beginning. To Prince of Thorns, to see if I can find the threads that run through all his books – this may become an obsession, wish me luck!
My thanks to Anne for an invite onto the tour and to Harper Voyager for a copy of the book. This does not effect my review in any way.
Author Profile
Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to British parents 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.
He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. 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 Bristol.
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