The Girl from Everywhere Review

This week's novel is The Girl from Everywhere, time travel fantasy by Heidi Heilig.  This was recommended to me by NPR's list of the best books of 2016. Well done, NPR.

Nix's father has the ability to sail anywhere as long as he has a hand drawn, detailed map of the place.  He can travel through time and even into myths, where he's picked up a rag tag crew turned family, but he's obsessed with getting back to 1868 Honolulu where the love of his life, Nix's mother, died of an infection that could have been cured with antibiotics.  Nix is concerned that if he ever manages it, her existence will be erased, but her father brushes off her worries.  Feeling as though she's living on borrowed time, Nix longs to learn to navigate so she can escape on her own ship and live out her life for as long as she can.  When her father is offered the map he needs in exchange for robbing the Honolulu treasury, he agrees to teach Nix to navigate in exchange for her help on this one last job.

So much of the beauty of this story comes from the relationships between the characters: Nix and her father's rocky love for each other; Nix's blooming, hesitant romance with Kashmir, the thief they picked up in a town from 1001 Arabian Nights; and Bee's surrogate maternal relationship with Bee, the widow from Northern Africa, and her wife's ghost.  They're all layered and conflicting, emotional and logical. 

But it would just be wrong to not mention the lush locations.  Most of the novel is spent in Hawai'i before the overthrow.  Heilig does a fantastic job conveying the beauty of the island paradise, while also conveying the tensions of class discrepancy and racism in Honolulu.  But all her settings are evocative.  They surround you, from the bustling port in India to the buzz of modern New York City, to the eerie emptiness of the tomb of the first Qin Emperor.  Now I want a whole story set in the first Quin Emperor's tomb. 

And on top of the emotional weight and the scenery, there's what turns into a tight, intricate time travel story.  Everything is set in motion for a reason and all the little details fit together.  I like loosey-goosey time travel stories, but this kind of detailed, quick plotting in time travel is always so rewarding to read.

She gets into the issue that things that have happened will always happen, because if they happened, you as a time traveler made it happen.  That sounds more round about than it feels--the worst part of time travel is talking about it--but not only is this part of the plot, but it works its way in as a motivation for the crew.  They know robbing the Hawaiian treasury is wrong and will help the white Americans destabilize the government and eventually take over, but then again, they know the Hawaiian government will fall.  And what's really neat about this is that in the author's notes at the end (which I usually don't care about) we find out that this heist really took place (more or less), which adds this whole other level of intrigue.

Highly recommend.

***

Next week: Every Anxious Wave, time travel for rock concerts by Mo Daviau.