my grandma gifted me this for my birthday and it's actually about our ancestor!! this is about the daughter of notoriously stick up his ass mean naval captain and later governor of nsw, william bligh. i've heard stories of this guy before because my grandpa lovesss history but it was very interesting to hear the story through the eyes of his daughter! however, my main problem with this is that is historical fiction based on a real life person and I think the author got bogged down by real life events. home girl did not need to include literally everything that was ever documented about these people but she did! and not in a good way! there were certain times where she would basically do a time skip for like 1 year or 5 years while she did this time skip she would basically list (what i'm assuming is) literally every single thing that was documented to have happened during this time. like "this happened to the grain harvest and father dealt with this disupte and then this happened and then that happened" and i'm just like oh my god that doesn't matter!!!! shut up!!!! i think that because this was based on real life people the author felt pressure to get every single fact straight but that doesn't really make for an interesting fiction book and i think the book would have been more enjoyable for me if she created new characters based off of the existing people in history or even if she just left out some of the random nonsense that does not contribute to the story at all 😭😭also it's kind of impossible to write a story about colonial australia and leave out the indigenous australians and i think that this story did not do a very good job at it. yes it mentioned them but always in an off-handed way that made it clear that the main characters were not awful people who wanted to kill natives but it didn't really go further than that which i would say was disappointing but tbh i did not really expect it to address it at all :// 3 stars