Sunday, May 30, 2021

The Girl from Everywhere (Heidi Heilig)

The Girl from Everywhere
The Girl from Everywhere series, Book 1
Heidi Heilig
Greenwillow
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)


DESCRIPTION: Teenager Nixie Song is a girl without a home, and without a time. She was born in 19th century Honolulu, but her father Slate - a Navigator who can pass between times and places, even entering mythical realms, with the right maps - came from the late 20th century in New York City... and, for nearly as long as she's been alive, he has been singularly obsessed with returning to save her mother, who died in childbirth while he was away. Aboard their ship, the Temptation, crewed by people from around the world and across the timestream, Slate seeks the increasingly rare and elusive maps that will bring him back to 1860's Hawaii, imagined panaceas to spare his lover's life, and vast fortunes to pay to continue the search itself. With her uncanny intuition about the authenticity of maps, Nixie has always been an indispensable part of his quest, but she chafes under his control. For one thing, she's becoming a young woman, and has her own dreams. For another, if Slate succeeds in saving her mother, it may snuff out her own life as though she'd never been born. When they, at long last, find a passage back to Hawaii - albeit in the 1880's, rather than the 1860's - Slate finally has a chance to purchase the map that may save his true love, but at a great cost to the Hawaiian people, his crew, and Nixie herself. How far is Nixie willing to go to support her father's obsession? Does she even have a choice, or has fate already decided for her? Her dilemma only grows more urgent when she meets the boy Blake Hart and begins to imagine a life beyond the deck of the Temptation, a life lived for herself.

REVIEW: I wanted to like this story. With the imaginative concept of sailing to nearly any place that has had a map drawn of it - even places that turned out not to exist, but were fervently believed in by the mapmakers - and the promise of grand wonders and impossible lands, with the intriguing peripheral crew of the Temptation, I really, really wanted to like this story. But I just couldn't. The characters and the plot wouldn't let me. Mostly, it's the tale of Nixie's father Slate, an emotionally abusive opium addict who literally does not care whether his own daughter (or anyone else) lives or dies so long as he gets his next hit and can pursue the ghost of a woman who always seems more like an ephemeral ideal than anyone of flesh and blood. She and the rest of the crew are victims, trapped by a tyrant, none more so than Nixie; her entire life is serving a man who sees right through her when he bothers to look at her at all. At first, this lends some nice angst and tragedy to her tale, but soon it became irritating when she did nothing but be a victim, receiving nothing but indifference (at best) or outright threats and scorn for her troubles. She's just an object to most everyone in the story, seen as a prize to be won or fought over, a means to an end, and what little agency she manages to gather is almost immediately squandered on others or snatched away while she hesitates. The whole story is clouded by this toxic relationship, the wonders muted, the characters shunted to the side and reduced to tropes or outright stereotypes, to the point where I couldn't bother caring about anyone or their fates, which become entangled in the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy and a temporal paradox and a local boy who develops a possessive crush (that's passed off as love). Things do happen, setbacks occur, a manufactured crisis punctuates the ending, but I found myself not really giving a dang. What's the point of being able to go anywhere, if I have to go there with Nixie and Slate?

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