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oraclereadings 's review for:
A Million to One
by Adiba Jaigirdar
The history of the Titanic has been one that I have been interested in ever since I was a little girl. When I saw that this book was about four young women boarding the ship with a heist plan, and that there was a LGBT+ romance involved, I was immediately interested. I grabbed this book without hesitation and began reading.
I was instantly pulled in with the thrill of our first heroine, Josefa, running away after successfully stealing a way onto the Titanic. And then my interest started to fade as more characters were introduced. I find it hard to focus when books have multiple point of views from more than two characters.(At least those are written in a third person perspective or I would have dropped this book.)
Honestly, I couldn’t match the characters to the cover until they were boarding the ship. I absolutely despise when there is a full page dedicated to the characters appearance, but without the cover I would not have been able to picture these girls at all.
Josefa
Our leading main character, the one with the plan behind the heist. She ran away from her old boarding school in Spain for a life of freedom and takes upon thieving from the rich.
Violet
An incredible actress and dissembler originally from Croatia, working hard to send money back to her brother Marko.
Hinnah
A circus acrobat that was kicked out of her family home of 1912 India (now known as Pakistan). She has the ability to contort her body and push herself to perform amazing tricks.
Emilie
An amazing artist who can replicate any drawing by hand. She is responsible for recreating the infamous Rubaiyat and forging documents for the crew. Emilie grew up in France with Haitian heritage. She agrees to help the other young women in hopes of meeting her relations from Haiti.
A romance starts to bloom between Emilie and Josefa and it starts to sidetrack their mission. I honestly felt no chemistry between the two and it felt very forced. There was also a blatant hatred that Violet held for Emilie and it was never explained, other than Violet thinking that Emilie was a spoiled rich girl. I was kind of expecting for Violet and Josefa to have had a past relationship of sorts and that was why Violet held so much aggression towards Emilie, but that wasn’t the case.
We soon realize the real reason that Josefa wanted to board the Titanic and it splits the friendship between the girls. All while this is happening, the four of them get accused of stealing a hairpin that Emilie had lost at the beginning of boarding the ship. I thought that there would be some sort of meaning behind the accessory, or that a plot twist would happen revolving around Emilie, but neither of those things happened.
Towards the end when the Titanic started going down, I was hoping for some Easter eggs to the real life events. Throughout the entirety of the book, it did not feel like our main characters were on board of the Titanic. I even forgot at one point that they were on a ship at all, let alone a historically famous one. We must be saving all of the bits for end, right? I kept telling myself. But other than the ship sinking and mention of the passengers climbing onto the lifeboats, there was no real setting of what had happened that night.
⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆
• 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 •
✰ 3.5 ✰ I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t have quite the impact that I thought it would.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☽✰☾━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I was instantly pulled in with the thrill of our first heroine, Josefa, running away after successfully stealing a way onto the Titanic. And then my interest started to fade as more characters were introduced. I find it hard to focus when books have multiple point of views from more than two characters.
Honestly, I couldn’t match the characters to the cover until they were boarding the ship. I absolutely despise when there is a full page dedicated to the characters appearance, but without the cover I would not have been able to picture these girls at all.
Josefa
Our leading main character, the one with the plan behind the heist. She ran away from her old boarding school in Spain for a life of freedom and takes upon thieving from the rich.
Violet
An incredible actress and dissembler originally from Croatia, working hard to send money back to her brother Marko.
Hinnah
A circus acrobat that was kicked out of her family home of 1912 India (now known as Pakistan). She has the ability to contort her body and push herself to perform amazing tricks.
Emilie
An amazing artist who can replicate any drawing by hand. She is responsible for recreating the infamous Rubaiyat and forging documents for the crew. Emilie grew up in France with Haitian heritage. She agrees to help the other young women in hopes of meeting her relations from Haiti.
A romance starts to bloom between Emilie and Josefa and it starts to sidetrack their mission. I honestly felt no chemistry between the two and it felt very forced. There was also a blatant hatred that Violet held for Emilie and it was never explained, other than Violet thinking that Emilie was a spoiled rich girl. I was kind of expecting for Violet and Josefa to have had a past relationship of sorts and that was why Violet held so much aggression towards Emilie, but that wasn’t the case.
We soon realize the real reason that Josefa wanted to board the Titanic and it splits the friendship between the girls. All while this is happening, the four of them get accused of stealing a hairpin that Emilie had lost at the beginning of boarding the ship. I thought that there would be some sort of meaning behind the accessory, or that a plot twist would happen revolving around Emilie, but neither of those things happened.
Towards the end when the Titanic started going down, I was hoping for some Easter eggs to the real life events. Throughout the entirety of the book, it did not feel like our main characters were on board of the Titanic. I even forgot at one point that they were on a ship at all, let alone a historically famous one. We must be saving all of the bits for end, right? I kept telling myself. But other than the ship sinking and mention of the passengers climbing onto the lifeboats, there was no real setting of what had happened that night.
⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆
• 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 •
✰ 3.5 ✰ I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t have quite the impact that I thought it would.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☽✰☾━━━━━━━━━━━━━━