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sophia_sol) wrote2018-04-10 09:07 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-04-10 09:07 pm
The Ship Beyond Time, by Heidi Heilig
The sequel to The Girl From Everywhere, and it is so gooooood! This one focuses on the question of whether it's possible to deliberately change the past using time travel. Also it heavily features a Western myth that I have never heard of before, which is frankly astonishing to me given how much folklore and mythology I have read in my time.
Nix and co travel to the mythical island of Ker-Ys to meet a man who tells Nix he can change the past. As Nix has had her fortune told that she will lose the one she loves to the sea, she's feeling rather desperate to learn if this can be avoided.
But this book also has some sections that are from the pov of Kashmir, Nix's love interest, and he has some different priorities of focus. Kashmir comes from a map that Nix and Nix's world would deem mythological - Navigators can travel using any map so long as the creator of that map believed in the truth of the map, regardless of whether such a place ever "really" existed in our world's history.
And so Kashmir is understandably concerned with questions of what this means about his own reality - was he created to be who he is and love who he loves, or does he really exist as his own person? I like that Nix herself completely fails to comprehend Kashmir's concerns, and yet Nix's and Kash's preoccupations are both treated by the narrative as worth spending time on.
The time travel in this book was a bit more confusing in the last one, due to it being a more complicated time-line, and I definitely did not succeed at keeping track of it all. But I was reading this book during, uh, a rather stressful period of my life where I was definitely not sleeping enough and was having trouble focusing on things. So like, the problem probably isn't the book, is what I'm saying.
One frustration I do have with this book is how Nix's mother Lin is handled. Lin, whose definitive deadness was a major plot point in the last book, actually appears in person halfway through this book due to the time travel shenanigans! And I was really excited about this development, and then....she is almost a nonentity. She does and says very little, the book doesn't really focus on her, Nix has like, one brief scene of actually having a conversation with her, and then Lin is dead again at the end of the book.
Dead again at the end of the book could have been fine, but given how important Lin is to multiple major characters in this book, her presence should have...had more weight, I guess? It was weird.
Anyway whatever I thoroughly enjoyed this book and had a lot of feelings throughout and had to stop multiple times while reading to clutch the book to my chest, so you know, there's all that. I'm having trouble articulating all the good stuff about it though. Probably influenced by the aforementioned stress and sleep deprivation. IT'S FINE. EVERYTHING WENT FINE.
Nix and co travel to the mythical island of Ker-Ys to meet a man who tells Nix he can change the past. As Nix has had her fortune told that she will lose the one she loves to the sea, she's feeling rather desperate to learn if this can be avoided.
But this book also has some sections that are from the pov of Kashmir, Nix's love interest, and he has some different priorities of focus. Kashmir comes from a map that Nix and Nix's world would deem mythological - Navigators can travel using any map so long as the creator of that map believed in the truth of the map, regardless of whether such a place ever "really" existed in our world's history.
And so Kashmir is understandably concerned with questions of what this means about his own reality - was he created to be who he is and love who he loves, or does he really exist as his own person? I like that Nix herself completely fails to comprehend Kashmir's concerns, and yet Nix's and Kash's preoccupations are both treated by the narrative as worth spending time on.
The time travel in this book was a bit more confusing in the last one, due to it being a more complicated time-line, and I definitely did not succeed at keeping track of it all. But I was reading this book during, uh, a rather stressful period of my life where I was definitely not sleeping enough and was having trouble focusing on things. So like, the problem probably isn't the book, is what I'm saying.
One frustration I do have with this book is how Nix's mother Lin is handled. Lin, whose definitive deadness was a major plot point in the last book, actually appears in person halfway through this book due to the time travel shenanigans! And I was really excited about this development, and then....she is almost a nonentity. She does and says very little, the book doesn't really focus on her, Nix has like, one brief scene of actually having a conversation with her, and then Lin is dead again at the end of the book.
Dead again at the end of the book could have been fine, but given how important Lin is to multiple major characters in this book, her presence should have...had more weight, I guess? It was weird.
Anyway whatever I thoroughly enjoyed this book and had a lot of feelings throughout and had to stop multiple times while reading to clutch the book to my chest, so you know, there's all that. I'm having trouble articulating all the good stuff about it though. Probably influenced by the aforementioned stress and sleep deprivation. IT'S FINE. EVERYTHING WENT FINE.