Book Review: The Ship Beyond Time by Heidi Heilig

Last year The Girl from Everywhere, Heidi Heilig's debut novel, took the bookish world by storm. Since then, we have all been waiting the second and final chapter of this story and here it is! Read my thoughts about it to see if it is as good as the first book:

Title: The Ship Beyond Time

Author: Heidi Heilig

Published: March 23rd 2017 by Hot Key Books

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: The breathtaking sequel to the acclaimed The Girl from Everywhere. 

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 future lies bright before her - until she learns that she is destined to lose the one she loves.

Desperate to change her fate, Nix sails 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: best friend, thief, charmer extraordinaire.

Heidi Heilig weaves fantasy, history, and romance together to tackle questions of free will, fate, and what it means to love another person. At the centre of this adventure are extraordinary, complicated, and multicultural characters who leap off the page, and an intricate, recognizable world that has no bounds. This sequel - and conclusion - to The Girl from Everywhere includes five black-and-white maps of historical and mythical locations. Fans of Alwyn Hamilton, Sarah J. Maas, and Outlander will be swept away.

Review: Last year I read The Girl from Everywhere and really enjoyed it. In fact, as soon as I finished, I hoped there was going to be a sequel to that story as I felt like the characters still had a lot to tell. And here we are, with the sequel. This story picks up just where the other ended, with Slate and his crew leaving 19th century Hawaii with an extra crew member, the young Hawaiian that helped them escape the island. 

From there, we follow them to present day New York, where the one and only British explorer James Cook contacts them and asks them to meet in a mythological island. As you can imagine, things are not straight forward with Captain Cook and soon the crew gets in quite a bit of trouble. Once again, the story is packed with action and we get to learn a lot about the places they visit. I think that the mixture between real history and mythology is really well handled and you never feel lost or doubt anything. You are totally immersed in this fantasy world and you complete forget that no, time travel is not possible in the real world (sigh).

Actually, I really love how time travel takes place in this stories. We got all the technical explanations in the first book so in this one we just enjoy going to impossible places. In fact, the main focus of the story shifts a bit from the simple act of time traveling to the consequences that playing with time might have and how far the characters are ready to go to defy history and physics. 

The story also centers more in the main love story between the brave Nix and the charming Kashmir. This story line was more secondary in The Girl from Everywhere, in which there's a love triangle, but in The Ship Beyond Time, their love plays a huge role, making them do things you might not expect. But, as these two were my favourite characters in the first book, I loved all the attention they got in this one. 

All in all, I had a lot of fun reading this story. It's highly entertaining, it's really well thought and it surprised me several times. If you love history, fantasy, romance and multicultural and interesting characters, then you cannot miss these two books. They are fascinating. 

Rating: 4 stars

I would like to thank the publisher for sending me a copy of this book. This is my honest opinion.