Luck of the Titanic - Stacey Lee

 Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Valora Luck has two things: a ticket for the biggest and most luxurious ocean liner in the world, and a dream of leaving England behind and making a life for herself as a circus performer in New York. Much to her surprise, though, she's turned away at the gangway; apparently, Chinese people aren't allowed into America.

But Val has to get on that ship. Her twin brother, Jamie, who has spent two long years at sea, is on board, as is an influential circus owner. Thankfully, there's not much a trained acrobat like Val can't overcome when she puts her mind to it.

As a stowaway, Val should keep her head down and stay out of sight, But the clock is ticking and she has just seven days as the ship makes its way across the Atlantic to find Jamie, audition for the circus owner, and convince him to help get them both into America.

Then one night, the unthinkable happens, and suddenly Val's dreams of a new life are crushed under the weight of the only thing that matters: survival."

 

 I love how coy they are with "the unthinkable happens," like someone picking up this book might not know what it is. Don't want to spoil the big twist! 🤣 Anyway, I definitely chose this book because I've been obsessed with the Titanic since I was a kid and I loved the perspective it was written from. There's a note at the beginning of the book, "of the eight Chinese passengers aboard the Titanic, six survived." This is obviously a fictional version of what happened, but it is amazing to think about so many of this admittedly small number surviving when not only were they in third class, but due to racism and anti-Chinese sentiment specifically, they were viewed even by others in that class as "the lowest." Incredible that with help being focused on women and children in first class specifically, so many of the Chinese passengers managed to make it off the ship to safety. 

Even knowing what happens to the Titanic and knowing that six of the eight Chinese passengers survived, the ending of this book still managed to get me. It was a very emotional conclusion, and I finished reading right before I went to sleep, so of course then I dreamed about being on the Titanic all night. So restful. I couldn't stop reading, though...nightmares seem like a fair trade for an unputdownable book. Val board the Titanic with lofty goals - reunite with her twin brother, find a way to gain an audience with the owner of the Ringling Brothers circus, and convince Jamie to audition and stay in America with her. A significant portion of the book centers around those goals, and there's something so very strange about reading a book and rooting for someone to pull off the impossible and forge a new life for themselves when...you know the boat is going to sink. You know it's not going to happen. 

Even with that knowledge, though, I couldn't help but root for Val. I could see that new life taking shape for her. Hope can be so insidious sometimes, but her determination, grit, and creativity made it impossible not to root for her. Stacey Lee developed the characters so well, it made my heart ache knowing what was coming for them. I didn't want two of the eight Johnnies to die. I wanted them all to make it, I wanted the ship to make it to New York and for everyone to have a happily ever after (except the racist, classist assholes on board, they could fall into the ocean and at the very least ruin their fancy clothes). That's the tough thing about reading a well-written historical fiction set in a tragedy, I suppose...you want a different ending. You want a time machine, to fix all the little things that went wrong and led to the tragedy in the first place. But you have to live with what you get.