“The age of exploration is long over, amira. Now it’s the age of globalization. And once everyone agrees something is one way, all the other ways it could have been disappear.” [loc. 958]
Nixie Song is sixteen years old and lives aboard her father's pirate ship, the Temptation. This is not your usual pirate scenario, though, for the Temptation can sail to any place or time, as long as Nixie's father Slate has a hand-drawn map to that place. And given the fantastical nature of some cartography, their voyages are not limited to the mundane. Nix's best friend, Kash (short for Kashmir) seems to have originated in an Arabian Nights-flavoured city, while the ship is illuminated by glowing fish from a mythical land named Scandia.
Nix is as much at home (or as much a stranger) in 21st-century New York as in 18th-century India. But her father, opium-addicted and probably bipolar, is obsessed by a single place and time: Honolulu, 1884, where Nix's mother died giving birth to her. He's determined to find a way back to save his lost love -- but then what will become of Nix?
I loved the mechanics of Navigation, the piracy, the ancient tombs, the tiger-smuggling and the sense of danger in the margins of the maps. (And Swag, the miniature dragon.) I liked Nix's pragmatism and competence -- she's the one in charge of trading, and she really wants to learn Navigation so that she can have a ship of her own -- though was less impressed with some of her more stubborn decisions. I liked the twisty and evolving plot, and the secondary characters, and the audacious heist in 19th-century Hawai'i, and the vividness of Heilig's locations. The romantic triangle, however, left me cold.
That said, my recollection of The Girl from Everywhere (which I bought in 2017!) is somewhat blurred by the bad cold I was enduring when I read it. I'd like to reread before embarking on the sequel, The Ship Beyond Time.
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