A Million to One

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I sympathize with Hinnah on never feeling like she was enough or could be accepted for who she was, but if we don't get any insight into WHY her parents acted the way they did, the readers are left with the same old "my brown parents are oppressive" shit that the Western world loves to eat up and use as justification on why no woman would ever want to voluntarily choose modesty. I like that we’re introduced originally to just Claire and Tristan and then Devin and Espie just sort of join the party! And that’s where Adiba saves her best till the end, cranking her writing up to an eleven, balancing that great character work we’ve seen throughout the book with an anxiety ridden and tension filled banger of a third act.

And if one is to make it out of there, manufacture a fresh start, one must be bold, for a leap of faith is sometimes required.

Idk I'm not in the business of feeling bad for rich people who think a comfortably wealthy life is boring. Being the older sibling, and the only family either one has left, she feels responsible for his well-being and would certainly do all she could to facilitate a happy reunion. Emilie could tell the others were on board when Josefa had pulled the three of them into her bedroom.

But while 50% of this cover is non-white, the makeup of the overall passenger list was a much, much lower number. Emilie who is dealing with grief and trying to find her place in the world without the family she knew and her art.

And I'm not saying all this to harp on the lack of food descriptions, every character's background was so vague and rushed that you might as well substitute and swap out the races/ethnicities, it wouldn't have made a difference. The importance of friendship is a very strong theme throughout this book and I really enjoyed how each of the four girls were so very different, with unique personalities.

B]rief chapters in alternating perspectives reveal conflicting interests, hidden motives, and mutual pining. I never got a sense we were in Ireland while the characters were on land, and I can not tell you a single description that transported me to the setting of the Titanic. The sapphic side of Jaigirdar’s books is always excellent, and A Million to One is her best romance yet. Josefa, a thief, chooses and then leads the girls on their daring escapade – they all have skills that will come in handy in the heist; Hinnah is an acrobat from the circus, Violet an actress with amazing talent, and Emilie an artist who can copy absolutely anything. It's such an implausible origin story that her Pakistani parents saw their 12-year-old daughter with a boy in her room and decided to throw her out.But now there’s a new piece of sapphic culture inspired by the Ship of Dreams (which is just as well given Leo’s being dragged to filth for dating a 19 year-old). Every O’Neill guest has their reasons, a story as to how they found themselves stagnate at not quite the end of the road, but pretty damn close. An engrossing read which illustrates the difficult position of unattached girls in the 1910’s – will make a super read for historical fiction fans. The thing about A Million to One was that everything came down to the execution, and the execution failed miserably.

The second time I saw this was in The Ones We Burn when the white witch girl was convinced the Black princess was super privileged because she was royalty. They couldn't be more different and yet they have one very important thing in common: their lives depend on breaking into the vault and capturing the Rubiyat. Okay, okay, I'm a bit old-fashioned and even enjoy the gender roles that are present in this culture. I will be the first to acknowledge that socioeconomic privilege plays a big role in how you navigate the world - but in a time period where visibly being BIPOC got you horrific treatment and often dangerous backlash - I had no interest in holding Violet's hand and walking her through the epiphany on why her white privilege actually gave her an advantage over every one of her BIPOC heist members. But careless mistakes, old grudges and new romances threaten to jeopardise everything they’ve worked towards.

In many parts they kind of blended together and while reading I didn’t even remember whose chapter it was and in the end it didn’t really matter anyway. You have to center that experience according to the setting and it's no surprise that the execution was lackluster given that Jaigirdar didn't even spend three pages giving us any setting description to work with. Adiba Jaigirdar, author of one of TIME 's Best YA books of all time and winner of the YA Book Prize 2022, gives Titanic an Ocean's 8 makeover in this nail-biting heist set onboard the infamous ship.