Review: The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

The Girl From Everywhere #1

Publisher: Greenwillow Books

Publication Date: February 16th, 2016

Rating: 3 Stars

Source: eARC from Netgalley

Pages: 464

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Summary (from Goodreads):

Nix has spent her entire life aboard her father’s ship, sailing across the centuries, across the world, across myth and imagination.

As long as her father has a map for it, he can sail to any time, any place, real or imagined: nineteenth-century China, the land from One Thousand and One Nights, a mythic version of Africa. Along the way they have found crewmates and friends, and even a disarming thief who could come to mean much more to Nix.

But the end to it all looms closer every day.

Her father is obsessed with obtaining the one map, 1868 Honolulu, that could take him back to his lost love, Nix’s mother. Even though getting it—and going there—could erase Nix’s very existence.

For the first time, Nix is entering unknown waters.

She could find herself, find her family, find her own fantastical ability, her own epic love.

Or she could disappear.

I will start this review out by saying that I really thought that I would like this book a lot more than I actually did. I was really excited for this book, but I just kind of feel like it fell flat for me. I found myself feeling rather confused by a lot of what was going on in this book. 

The book starts off on the ship Temptation with a diverse group of pirates navigating through time to real and mythical locations. We have the main character, Nix, her father and the Captain, Slate, Kashmir, Rotgut, and Bee. They have been searching for a specific map to take them back to 1868 Honolulu so that Slate can save Nix's mother from dying during childbirth, apparently even if that means that Nix may cease to exist.

Nix is an important person on the ship. She seems to be the resident expert on the authenticity of the maps they acquire and on the places they travel to. Everyone seems to love her and rely on her. So what I really and truly don't understand is why her father is so desperately searching for a map that might very well wipe her off the face of the Earth? And she knows this is a possibility and doesn't want that, but she still goes around helping him find the map that he needs to do just that? I don't understand the relationship there.

After acquiring a promising map, Captain Slate navigates the ship to it's location to find that it was dated incorrectly and they are actually in like 1884 Honolulu or something like that. They feel dejected until yet another 1868 map surfaces and they attempt to get ahold of it.

Of all the characters in this book, the only one I found myself actually liking was Kashmir. I didn't really DISLIKE the other characters, I just didn't particularly care about them?? I don't know.

There is a bit of a love triangle in this book. Nix seems to have a budding relationship going with Kashmir, whom they picked up from some mythical (I think, maybe??) map they found at one point. They have an awesome friendship that I was rooting for to go further. Then enter the other guy. I felt like he just clung to Nix as soon as he met her. Taking her on adventures and giving her his opinion on her relationship with Kashmir. Like, no one asked you. Take a seat. In the end, it doesn't seem like she's remotely close to either one of them to me. So I feel like I thought the romance was a bit of a let down.

I really loved all the attention to detail in the history and all the mythology! That was incredibly interesting to read about. It really shows how much research was done on this book and it's awesome!

I don't know how I felt about the method of time traveling. Just sailing off one map and onto another one. Maybe I would have liked it better if it was more detailed or explained better or something, I'm not sure! I was just kind of confused.

For the first half of this book, I thought I knew what was going on, but then when I got to the second half, I feel like I had no idea what happening. It almost felt as if, to me, the characters just made a split decision in their head and acted on it without informing me of what they had going on in their heads. For a lot of this book I seriously found myself scratching my head over how the characters went from doing one thing to doing another because I swear I had literally NO idea what was going on!

This is one of those books that I didn't really find myself just outright NOT liking, but I find it easier to talk about the things that I didn't like rather than trying to figure out what I actually did like. There were things that I did like about this book beyond the fact that I found it well researched.

Overall, I found this book to lack a lot of explanations that I needed to enjoy this story. If things had been explained better, I think I would have loved it. I love the time travel and pirates/ships trend that has been going around and this book had me SO excited! But I was ultimately let down. I think that I would read the second book in this series, I'm interested to see where things go from the ending of this book. I would recommend this book to people who are into time travel, pirates, and Hawaii.