Review of The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Title/Author: The Girl From Everywhere (The Girl From Everywhere #1) by Heidi Heilig
Publisher/Date published: Greenwillow Books, February 16th 2016
How I got this book: received it from the publisher as an egalley, thanks!

Goodreads summary: Sixteen-year-old Nix Song is a time-traveller. She, her father and their crew of time refugees travel the world aboard The Temptation, a glorious pirate ship stuffed with treasures both typical and mythical. Old maps allow Nix and her father to navigate not just to distant lands, but distant times - although a map will only take you somewhere once. And Nix's father is only interested in one time, and one place: Honolulu 1868. A time before Nix was born, and her mother was alive. Something that puts Nix's existence rather dangerously in question...

Nix has grown used to her father's obsession, but only because she's convinced it can't work. But then a map falls into her father's lap that changes everything. And when Nix refuses to help, her father threatens to maroon Kashmir, her only friend (and perhaps, only love) in a time where Nix will never be able to find him. And if Nix has learned one thing, it's that losing the person you love is a torment that no one can withstand. Nix must work out what she wants, who she is, and where she really belongs before time runs out on her forever.

The mention of time travel always pulls me in, as do pirates (because I have a thing for pirates, I cannot help myself), so this seemed like a golden combination. And I did like The Girl From Everywhere, just not as much as I'd hoped to.

There's a set of very complicated characters and Nix is a decent main character, but I'm still not entirely sure about her, but that might be because she herself isn't sure what she wants and who she wants to be. There's a restlessness about her that I felt throughout the novel and it made me itchy a bit myself.
Aside from Nix, there's Kashmir, who was an obvious instant like for me, because hello suave thief with lots of banter! I also really wanted to push him and Nix together and be like 'ok, now kiss'. I loved some of the moments between them, but aside from their banter, there's such a lack of communication! OMG, I just wanted to scream at them to just TALK to each other instead of constantly skirting around the subject and UGH!

But this is basically one of my main issues with The Girl From Everywhere: nobody communicated. Seriously. Or maybe it was just that Nix doesn't really communicate with anybody. Not with Kashmir, and also not with her father, which leads to lots of unnecessary difficulties and I mean, I know that without some of it there wouldn't be much of a plot, but I very much dislike when the plot revolves around people not being sensible enough to just talk to each other.

The other thing that was a bit jarring was that sometimes there would be jumps in conversation or scene or a time lapse and it made me wonder if I'd skipped over some part or if there was a page missing in my egalley, but it usually did flow in the sentence, so I'm guessing it was how it was meant to be, but that pulled me out of my reading flow.

I did very much like the idea of being able to travel to places and times based on maps and I loved all the use of mythology! Some of the time-line logic towards the end made me go cross-eyed a bit because of all the loops, but the author made it work. The ending felt sort of abrupt, in that something happened that felt out of character to me, but it does make me wonder what will happen next! There's so much build up in this novel and there's also some action, but I'm guessing we'll see lots more of it in the next book.

My rating: 3 stars