Sapphic. Titanic. Heist. These are the three buzzwords that had me immediately run to read this book. Unfortunately, this book just makes the cut for an average rating from me.
 
The story starts off introducing Josefa, a upper class girl turned thief from Spain. She is seen stealing tickets to board the Titanic and then immediately tries to recruit her best friend, Violet (an actress from Croatia), an acquaintance, Hinnah (an acrobat from now-Pakistan), and a stranger, Emilie (a French-Haitian artist from Paris). We have these four immigrant girls in Dublin who kinda, sorta know each other, who quickly agree to go along with this heist, setting off to board the Titanic and steal a jewel encrusted copy of the Rubaiyat. This portion of the book felt a bit rushed, I couldn't really see the strength in the relationships between the three girls who knew each other prior or the reality of Josefa never had spoken a word to Emilie and using this heist as an introduction. Emilie is not a criminal in any way prior to this meeting, whereas the other two girls have been involved in Josefa's previous cons. Violet is the only girl that doesn't come from a financially privileged background, Josefa was bored with the life as a lady, Hinnah was kicked out for dishonoring her family, and Emilie's been recently orphaned by a upper middleclass father. Though tickets to get onto the Titanic alone would possibly be enough of an incentive for someone at this time, getting on board with stealing such a unique item that would be difficult to pawn seems like something that would take more than a couple of paragraphs to resolve.

It also felt like there could've been a chapter or two dedicated to building the relationships between the girls while there prepped for the heist. Jaigirdair is telling me Violet and Josefa are best friends but I'm not seeing that relationship in this book. Particularly when August comes into the picture and Violet doesn't know who that is to Josefa. I also thought Josefa and Hinnah's backstories were weak or at the very least, underdeveloped. It also felt that Jaigirdair was relying on the reader to have a lot of prior knowledge on what Edwardian mannerism, classism, and fashion liked like as well as what the Titanic looked like. Just right off, the girls are traveling in second class which is probably the least talked about class on the Titanic so the lack of description of the second class levels was very disappointing. Not a lot of time is spent on relationship building once on the Titanic and the heist work was very lackluster. Josefa not a very believable con artist. A pickpocket? Yes. Debbie Ocean she is not. The girls were just bumbling around trying to steal this book. Any romantic chemistry between Josefa and Emilie (which I couldn't see at all) was superficial throughout the book. Also, all of these girls are immigrants and half of them are women of color but everything about them and their stories were so surface level the could easily be exchanged with anyone. While I don't think one always has to go into depth about the ethnic or cultural background in a historical fiction book particularly the painful aspects, but this is the Titanic, this would have been the setting to touch a little more on the classism, xenophobia, and/or sexism that would have impacted their heist. 

I was entertained while reading the book, but I had to fill in a lot of blanks left in the worldbuilding and relationships between the characters. I will say I've loved the other books I've read by Jaigardair and don't think it reflects poorly on her ability to write good sapphic YA books.