The Ship Beyond Time

Heidi Heilig

Feb 2017 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

The breathtaking sequel to the acclaimed The Girl from Everywhere.

“Fresh and exciting . . . truly the perfect playground for adventure.”—NPR.org

“Thrilling.”—School Library Journal (starred review)

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 center 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 Leigh Bardugo, Sabaa Tahir, and Outlander will be swept away.

Ratings and reviews

At the end of The Girl from Everywhere, Nyx's father Slate had given up his quest to rescue her mother, and chooses his daughter's continued existence instead. The world of this series is dependent on time travel paradoxes, with changes in future reflecting changes in past and vice versa. If an event has occurred, it was destined to occur and somehow events fold themselves to happen. So, there are some things that are rigid and some that are not - which is why, when Nyx learns of a prophecy that could mean she will lose Kashmir, she looks for a way to escape that fate. This desire brings her into the orbit of another time traveler like her and her dad, through whom she learns new secrets about this power that they hold over time and reality. A major concept of The Girl from Everywhere was about the Navigator (the time traveler) and the cartographer's intention and belief shaping the way the dimension or time they enter while traveling to, adheres to the recorded history or not. Heilig builds on that concept in this novel, with a myth about a lost city that was sunken (no, it is not Atlantis), while also bringing back Hawaii's theft into the story back again, with the dynamic between seafaring and colonization. There are events in the book at which Nyx finds herself at a crossroads, finding a way to answering the eternal ethical question - 'If you could change history, would you do?'. Even on a theoretical level, this question is difficult to answer simply - there are parts of history that were ugly, but if you had a stake in the matter, would you let it happen? That is the crux of Nyx's emotional arc during this book - accepting what can and cannot, or should not, be changed. Along with Nyx, there is another POV in this book - Kashmir, whose role gets more prominent as Nyx's love interest. Granted he is more than that, but his arc in the first book was mostly about it, so let's start with that. His part in this book is to be the grounding counterpoint to the Navigators and their godlike powers - he is part-myth, part-reality, and he is insecure about his place in life if he is more of the former than the latter. BUT, he does not let his insecurity come between his relationship to Nyx; instead, he tries to reason with her, how chasing the probably impossible might be too much for a person to bear. Even his friendship with Blake - he is quite kind to someone who would be considered a romantic rival in other novels. Of course, Blake and Nyx don't have a thing going - they both are still wary from how their budding relationship imploded at the end of the last book, but a slow friendship starts to form again, with them being on opposite sides of history. Overall, this book was a breathtakingly fast-paced second journey into the world Heilig has created. I kid you not, this book is difficult to put down, as there are developments upon developments. It delivered on its promise of being a sequel to The Girl from Everywhere, and more. The characters, fleshed out so well, their internal conflicts, their motives, their desires - it all makes for such rich story-telling on the part of the author, even during a fast-paced adventure novel like this. Amazing book and a sequel you should definitely have in your hands right away!

It was amazing!

About the author

Heidi Heilig is the author of The Girl from Everywhere, which was an Indie Next Pick and was also named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; its sequel, The Ship Beyond Time; and the Shadow Players trilogy: For a Muse of Fire, A Kingdom for a Stage, and On This Unworthy Scaffold. Heidi Heilig holds an MFA from New York University in musical theater writing, and she’s written the book and lyrics for several shows. She grew up in Hawaii, where she rode horses and raised peacocks. Her favorite thing, outside of writing, is travel, and she has haggled for rugs in Morocco, hiked the trails of the Ko‘olau Valley, and huddled in a tent in South Africa. Heidi Heilig lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.