Grad school semester finished and family emergency [mostly] addressed, I have time to write blog posts again!
And apologies for the terrible post title, but I just couldn’t help myself. Hopefully it conveys how much I really really really loved this new look at the Titanic voyage. It is in turns enlightening, hilarious, enraging, inspiring, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Stacey Lee has created a wonderful new heroine in Valora Luck and given us a brand new perspective on a story that most of us thought we didn’t need to hear told again.
I’m not a high school teacher, but if I were, I would try to find a way to work Luck of the Titanic into my curriculum somehow.
THE STORY
Valora and Jamie Luck are twins, children of a Chinese man and a British woman, who grew up holding poverty at bay with their parents. With both their parents dead now, the siblings are one another’s only family, but Valora hasn’t seen Jamie in years since he left London to find work elsewhere. Now she’s finally tracked him down: as part of a Chinese-British engine room team that’s supposed to be working the maiden voyage for the largest, most luxurious ocean liner in history. As it turns out, the wealthy woman that Val serves as a housemaid has also bought tickets for both herself and Val on that same ocean liner — and Val sees no reason why her mistress’ last-minute death should prevent her reunion with her brother. Instead, she sneaks on board and, once there, blusters her way into posing as her former employer. She must keep her face hidden, however, to evade the Chinese Exclusion Act, which will prevent any person of Chinese descent from entering the United States without special permission.
Val has a plan to get that permission: when they were children she and Jamie trained themselves to be incredible acrobatic street performers, hustling on London street corners to help their family eat. Val knows that a talent recruiter for Ringling Bros. Circus is on board, and she intends to convince him to hire both of them as legitimate American immigrants. Jamie, however, has found a new home with his engine room crew (the “Johnnies”), and doesn’t seem too keen on going to America to join the circus. Thus begins a story of push and pull, with Jamie regaining his hope and Val gradually joining his new family on the lower decks. All the while, Val must keep her secret identity from being discovered. And of course the Titanic and a certain iceberg have irreversible plans of their own.
THE BABBLE
[From here there be spoilers. But not too many because I don’t want to spoil it for you.]
So let’s just get the most important question out of the way first: is this book an adaptation of the movie Titanic? No. And…also kinda yes? I haven’t had a chance to ask Stacey Lee (not yet, though we live in the same area so maybe I’ll get the chance one day) but I have to believe that some of the parallels between Val’s story and the movie plot are intentional. There are similarities in the first class/lower class deck contrasts, a main character getting imprisoned right when the ship starts going down, parts of the final sequence, the cruelty toward the lower class passengers, even hints of a cross-class romance…and so on. But the beauty of those parallels is the way that Lee either subverts the movie’s most famous moments or shines a new light on them through the lens of racial prejudice.
Look, I’m a child of the 90s, so that movie is branded into my psyche. I’ve always thought that one of the more haunting images in the film is the moment when the ship’s crew members, a dozen decks above, lock the doors to the flooding engine rooms and effectively sacrifice the lives of any workers still left in those engine rooms. That’s a haunting image, but Stacey Lee has written an entire novel about the people staffing those engine rooms. Their hopes, their fears, the racism they faced even among other workers in their same class and line of work. She does such a great job of establishing those characters that I actually forgot, for about two-thirds of the book, that OOPS none of the stuff the characters were working toward was ever going to happen because the boat still had to sink.
And the final boat sinking sequence is devastatingly described. Lee tells it in such brilliant detail, you’ll feel as though you’re right there with the characters. That’s all I’m going to say because spoilers.
To be honest, this lands just under 4 stars for me because of the final two pages, which drop some serious plot reveals for which I wanted a little more explanation. I 100% understand why Lee made that stylistic choice, and it’s effective, but still…I wanted the story behind a few of those outcomes.
Seriously though, who cares? This novel is wonderful and so unique. Go forth and read!
RATING
****
RANDOM BABBLE
- I loved Val’s arc in this novel related to her parents, the way she slowly comes to grips with the fact that Jamie doesn’t share her affections or even her memories of her father.
- I did some Googling and as far as I can tell, April Hart was not a real person. Which makes me so, so sad.
- I was grateful that the quietly building romance between Val and Bo didn’t overwhelm the story at all.
- Excuse me while I go read everything else Stacey Lee has ever written, including and especially The Downstairs Girl, which I already knew I should have read by now…
Bookshelves & Babble 