*I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

I had picked up the eARC a while back and bounced off this book because I wasn't able to focus on it, and at the time was unsure if it was because I wasn't really clicking with any ebook or if it was because the prose was rather dense. After finishing (via audio, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller), I think it was a combination of the two. 

While this is compared to stories like Piranesi and The Night Tiger, which made me expect some sort of fantastical element, this is more of a narrative deep dive into Shek Yeung, a Chinese pirate active in the South China Sea in the early 1800s. I love the feminist take on pirates, and I find this era and area of history really fascinating, but I'm not sure how successful this was as a work of fiction. This is a short book, but I slogged through it, and despite being a book about pirates there was a shockingly small amount of action. 

I think this was an interesting premise, but for me the execution fell flat.