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The only life Nix has ever known has been aboard her father’s ship, the Temptation, sailing across the world into other centuries, places, and myths. As long as her father has a map for it, he can sail to any time or place, real or imagined. But they can’t sail to the same time and place twice, and the past, unfortunately, is the only place her father wishes to be.
He’ll stop at nothing to hunt down a map of Hawaii 1868. He’s already paid fortunes for maps that haven’t worked and dragged Nix along on the crazy chase. Then comes the day he finds it.
This new map looks genuine enough. Her father believes it’s the one that will work — the one that can take him back to Nix’s mother before she died so he can be there to save her. But what if saving Nix’s mother and traveling back to 1868 erases Nix’s very existence?
Her father says all will be well and nothing will happen to her, but he cannot know for sure. After all, her mother died in childbirth. It’s technically her fault she’s dead, and Nix isn’t entirely convinced that her father wouldn’t sacrifice her in order to start over and try to make things right in some parallel world.
All Nix knows is that she is entering unknown waters. She could find herself, find her family, find her own love … or she could vanish from history entirely.
The Girl From Everywhere combines history and myth (very happily for me because I love both), seamlessly weaving together facts, history, and magical objects until the reader feels as if she has entered some strange, alternate world. This comes through strongly in the setting as well. Enter Victorian Hawaii — a place that feels lost to time — a paradise that is not the same as the one we know now. To wrap it all up is a somewhat mind-boggling climax that left me eager for more time-traveling adventures steeped in fact and myth.
Throughout it all run the closely related themes of love and loss and a reminder to live the life each of us is given.
Rated: Mild. For close to 15 uses of the name of deity, as well as a few instances of mild language. Violence is sparse until the climax. There is some blood, though nothing too gory. However, there is a discovery of some deaths that readers may find unsettling. A character struggles with opium addiction. Characters kiss. Two characters fall asleep together; the crew insinuates that more went on when nothing did. A half-nude woman is mentioned briefly. There are hints at a married woman frequently having affairs.
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