The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Summary: 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.

Oh, this book! It’s definitely one of my favorites of 2016. This is exactly the kind of thinking person’s fantasy that I love best. It’s strange that it took me so long to get to it; I’d been looking forward to it so much that I preordered it in 2015, but then my copy got buried under a pile of library books and borrowed Advanced Reading Copies with due dates. I suppose I could have squeezed it in sooner and rushed through it, but I am so glad I didn’t. This is a book to savor, a world to dive into and hang out in, and even though I wanted to find out what happened next, I didn’t want to leave the spell of the Temptation and her inhabitants. Every character feels like a friend, revealed in all their flawed yet compelling glory. My favorites were Kashmir, who is so much more than just the charming thief he appears on the surface, and Nix herself, whose strength goes far beyond the usual fantasy heroine tropes. This story will stay with me for a long time. And the best part about having waited so long to read this? I won’t have to wait very long for the sequel!

THE GIRL FROM EVERYWHERE is out now.

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