Blog Tour: The Girl and the Moon – Mark Lawrence

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.

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.

My thoughts: I’ve really enjoyed this trilogy, Yaz is a great protagonist, strong, determined, smart and with a keen sense of self preservation. Even being sentenced to drowning isn’t going to stop her and her friends from carrying out their plan to reunite the shiphearts and open the Ark.

But the forces ranged against them aren’t going to stop, they want the same thing but for different reasons. Seus wants to open the Ark for his own purposes and they’re not good.

I got a bit confused trying to work out the links between this trilogy and The Book of the Ancestor trilogy – especially the timescale but once I stopped doing that and just went with the final adventure in the undercity, time stones, evil mages, kickass nuns and all, I really enjoyed returning to this world and finding out whether they all survive. The time travel bit at the end got me a bit muddled (I am not always good with such concepts) but it was really enjoyable.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.