It was a very average book, even for YA. It starts out promisingly enough with some secrets and a missing parent, but then kind of bobbed along. Andrew's biggest flaw is that she leans far too heavily on tell-don't-show and weakens her writing by pairing unnecessary adverbs with verbs strong enough to stand on their own. For example: "she glared furiously" - glare already implies anger or some other negative emotion. There is no need to prop it up with "furiously" tacked on the end. A big part of the tell-don't-show is how the MC knows how everyone is feeling (or knows when they are confused). She always sees a look of surprise or anger or something on their face/in their eyes. As a side note, what is up with pirates calling Nova "female"? It is super jarring and makes me feel like she's on a ship full of incels, which, while not far from the truth it seems, seems inauthentic.

Nova also becomes kind of insufferable towards the end. In addition to being a pick-me/not-like-other-girls, she undergoes chronic mood swings towards the end. If she's not brooding about being better than everyone else, she's crying about the situation she's in. Granted part of this is related to the plot, which is way overplayed before you're probably supposed to know what's going on (in part because of too much telling, ie: "the DARK POWER"), but it gets tiresome. I applaud Andrews' for trying to make a purely good hero, but it feels cheesy and ingenuine.

The character development (and therein, the romance) is lacking. I'm not even sure what the point of introducing us to Nova's two "friends" was for, other than to have side characters in the beginning parts (which I think could have been skipped entirely and seen in pieces as a memory/flashback). I can't even remember their names. While I'm kind of interested to know if they ever pop back up, I probably won't find out. But it's not just the two random friends in the beginning. All the characters are pretty flat, and I couldn't tell you a thing about them (even if I gave a fig).

And this doesn't just apply to the side characters. Even after all the time I spend with the Nova (since the story is told from third person limited), I don't really know who she is or what she wants other than the surface level desire of finding her father. That's not quite enough for me and is too rudimentary and flat. The only character that is as rounded as Nova, or more, is Smythe. Smythe seems to have some real desires/goals and is complex about how he goes about them, but that's not saying much.

The "romance" was especially lacking. For seemingly no other reason than he's the first boy she spent any real time with, he saved her life, and he's handsome, Nova has feelings for Atlas. This seems to start with some weird flirting and touching hands. Again, with the tell-don't-show, after a few months have passed, they share a cabin and are super flirty and make googly eyes at each other, much to the disgust of others.

Spoiler

This is so surface level that when he ultimately betrays her, I wasn't even phased. Her heart is splitting in two, but I don't care, plus there is a new cute boy on the boat who she is kind of batting her eyelashes at anyways.

This is all pretty disappointing given that the world is actually kind of neat, and I was really interested in the world building by the end of the book. However, I don't think I'm going to continue. My version of the book was only 281 pages (with large font and margins. It probably could have been 2/3s the length with proper formatting), and it was a bit of a slog. The writing style just isn't for me, even if the story is kind of interesting.