Review: The Ship Beyond Time by Heidi Heilig

The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere #2) by Heidi Heilig
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Released: 2nd March 2017
My Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Find it on Goodreads

Nix has spent her whole life journeying to places both real and imagined aboard her time-traveling father’s ship. And now it’s finally time for her to take the helm. Her father has given up his obsession to save her mother—and possibly erase Nix’s existence—and Nix’s future lies bright before her. Until she learns that she is destined to lose the one she loves. But her relationship with Kash—best friend, thief, charmer extraordinaire—is only just beginning. How can she bear to lose him? How can she bear to become as adrift and alone as her father?

Desperate to change her fate, Nix takes her crew to a mythical utopia to meet another Navigator who promises to teach her how to manipulate time. But everything in this utopia is constantly changing, and nothing is what it seems—not even her relationship with Kash. Nix must grapple with whether anyone can escape her destiny, her history, her choices. Heidi Heilig weaves fantasy, history, and romance together to tackle questions of free will, fate, and what it means to love another person. (from Goodreads)

While I did enjoy The Ship Beyond Time overall, I have to admit that at times, I found it confusing and a bit difficult to follow. As a result, I don’t think it was as good as The Girl from Everywhere, but I have liked reading this series as a whole and would still recommend it to fans of time travel and adventures on ships.

Nix was one of the reasons I kept on with this book even when I found it a bit unclear at times. I really liked her character, and her relationship with her father was very interesting in this book. In book one, I really didn’t like Slate, and to be honest, I still wasn’t his biggest fan in this book either, but I did like seeing how the relationship between father and daughter had changed and how Nix was adapting to this. One thing that I will point out is that I predicted the meaning of Joss’s fortune (Nix losing the one she loves) from the start, so the ending wasn’t really a surprise to me. While this didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book as a whole, I did kind of spend the whole time waiting for Nix to realise what was going to happen.

Kashmir got his own point of view in this book, and while it was nice to see from his POV, I felt his character wasn’t really as developed as he could be. I really wanted to know more about Kashmir but I felt like this book was all about his relationship with Nix and whether or not he could be saved and I don’t know. He got a bit cheesy at times, and I would have loved to explore his backstory more and what that meant in relation to his feelings for Nix (he touched on this in his own chapters, expressing his concerns about it, but I would have liked more detail). He was a great character though, and continued to be that voice of reason who always offered good advice.

Blake was Blake. I didn’t really like him in the first book, and I didn’t much like him in this book either. I understood why he was there though, and it was actually a bit sad to see that he was really similar to Nix and they could have been close friends in another life, if things had been different.

Plot-wise, this is where I was confused. I really struggled with the mythical places and travelling there by map, the whole Ancient Greece debacle, how they somehow managed to change the past but people retained memories in dreams (and there were all these alternate universes they could see in dreams - what?! This never came up in the first book!) and how [spoiler, highlight to read]Nix’s mother was somehow saved with no consequences. How? Plus, whatever happened to Dahut? I liked her[end of spoiler]. Navigation was also never fully explained and in the end I was just reading without understanding because I was too confused by it all. I doubt everyone will have the same problem, but I’ve always needed really clear explanations when it comes to books like this; I don’t like being forced to fill in blanks myself or pick up on really subtle hints or metaphors or whatever. It gets lost on me. I also found the ending a bit abrupt, especially since there’s not going to be another book.

Overall, while I did like this book, I did have a few problems with it. It’s a good read to pass the time, but I found it too confusing to fully appreciate (perhaps if I were more familiar with the myths in question, I’d be less puzzled by everything).