If you enjoy traveling to different dimensions, The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig may be the right book for you.

The main theme of the book is time travel. Time traveling is important because it is one way to find lost love again. In Heilig’s book, the main character, Nix, is a teenage girl of Chinese-European descent who time travels to different eras to find a map of Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1868. This map of Honolulu will help Nix’s father, Slate, find his lost true love, Nix’s mother, again. Once he attains the map, Nix can vanish because she is not born in 1868. In the book, the characters travel to modern-day New York, 19th-century Hawaii, and ancient China.

I have a bit of praise for this book. I like how Heilig adds figurative language to enhance the book. For example, “He took a small knife from the saddlebag and sliced one in half to reveal pink pulp studded with yellow seeds.” I could tell that the fruit was guava because guava is mostly known to have pinkish flesh. Another part I like about the book is how it combines languages of various cultures, such as “inshallah” in Arabic and “nĭ hăo” in Chinese. Last, Heilig incorporates both first- and third-person points of view. This is captivating because most books are from a third-person point of view.

Despite the minimal praise I have for this book, there are several areas for improvement. For example, Nix is not a very interesting protagonist because some aspects of her character are static. Her personality never grows throughout the book. If I were the author, I would probably change her personality to something more “exciting” because she is the main character. Instead, Nix’s personality is dull and it just makes the book less interesting.

I think the book is rather fast-paced, which is okay in some scenarios, but not the entire book. Some parts of the book can be removed because they relate little to the story. For example, three chapters show Nix and her crewmate, Kashmir, attempting to steal a map, but they fail. These three chapters of boringness and failure do not even help the story unfold. So, it is a filler to add more pages. Also, the part where the characters go to India is only one chapter long and rather irrelevant to most of the story. Honestly, it doesn’t need a whole chapter, a few sentences would be enough.

If I could make a change to the book, I would like Nix and Slate to time travel to different eras to find pieces of the map. Instead, the map is just given to them as a full piece. Along with that, I think the author should remove meaningless characters like Blake and Ms. Joss, because they contribute little to the story. Blake and Ms. Joss are characters that Nix meets when she is exploring a store in Chinatown. They are only referenced a few times throughout the entire book. In addition, the book is so boring that it took forever to read. It could be improved by removing confusing parts of the story and extraneous characters.

A book that is like The Girl from Everywhere is The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer. It is close to The Girl from Everywhere because the main characters, Alex and Conner, time travel to different fairy tales instead of time periods. I feel that The Land of Stories sets a good example because it was a book that I enjoyed with similar themes. Also, the tempo of the story flows at a steady pace, so the readers can follow the plot easily. It provides vivid details about the scenery and plot so that the story can fully unfold, and the characters blossom from bookworms to adventurers.

Overall, I give The Girl from Everywhere one out of five stars because of how confusing it is. Honestly, I would give it zero out of five stars, but there is no such thing as zero out of five stars, sadly. To summarize, the book contains a convoluted plot with confusing scenes and too many unnecessary characters. In addition, it is so fast-paced that I couldn’t even keep up with the changes in between chapters. However, I do give a small round of applause to the author for introducing readers to different cultures and writing styles. Additionally, the author included enough figurative language to make the book slightly more engaging. Still, this book gets one star because it contains too many flaws that make it confusing to understand.