Review of Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig

*Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea* by Rita Chang-Epp (2023). Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, for those of you who are my dedicated readers (I see you!), one of the biggest habits I’ve fallen into recently has been listening to audiobooks. One of my fellow cohort members in my graduate program who’s blind in one eye was telling me one day in our Decolonization class about how he listens to audiobooks on 4x speed.

During our conversation, he mentioned how throughout the years, he would build it up by gradually increasing the speed.

Basically, what he did was start at 1x and worked his way up until 4x. That’s what I started doing when I commuted to school, and eventually I worked my way up to 2x speed. It sounds perfectly normal to me at this point.

Anyways, during my Smithsonian internship hours I end up listening to audiobooks while I’m working. The point of that anecdote before was to tell you all that yes, I listen to them on 2x speed. So Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea was on my to read list before I noticed the audiobook was available through Libby, so I ended up checking out this version and listening to it.

But of course I had to head to New York that week, so I kept the checked out audiobook and listened to it during the entire three hour bus ride. Needless to say, I finished it rather quickly.

Onwards with the review then!

Shek Yeung learns survival as a female pirate and navigating a cruel world.

I will admit, I was partially inspired to pick up this book because as a teenager in middle school I was obsessed with the female Chinese pirate Ching Shih. If you know the story of Ching Shih (I highly recommend Googling her after reading this blog post if you can), you’re going to straight up notice the elements of this specific story that are inspired by her life.

Except in this novel, our protagonist is Shek Yeung, who sees a foreign sailor murder her husband before her eyes. Because she has some survival instincts within her, she has to make a quick decision about what to do next.

What she ends up deciding upon is that in order to keep her life going, she has to marry the second in command of her husband, and provide him with a son and heir in order to appease the man with her existence.

Her goal is to keep things going with the fleet and their daily operations hustling, but bigger threats are looming on the horizon for them. Not only is the Chinese Emperor starting to crack down on those roaming the sea, but the Europeans are increasingly starting to mess with the affairs of the local pirates.

So for in order for Shek Yeung to maintain her grip of power, she has to now navigate these new threats on the water. I really think this is a book that catches a lot of people with the synopsis, because when I went back and read it while preparing to write this review, I found it to be kind of clickbaity.

You’d kind of expect this to be a book that leans on thriller territory, or even action, but in fact it’s very much rooted in the scenes, flowing a bit like the ocean.

Like we sit with Shek Yeung and what she’s feeling throughout the book. There are rich, luscious passages that really make this book learn into historical fiction territory, which I personally enjoyed a lot more than the classic pirate lore.

The details included throughout made me feel like I was immersed in the world of the story, even though I was only listening to it through an audiobook, and I got to know the setting in an intimate manner. The action is more subdued, I would say, and straight up just implied at certain sections of the novel.

This is a book that had a lot of themes crammed into it, and I think it would’ve benefitted from being a bit longer to expand on certain topics. We have a riveting main character who comes from nothing to be a feared female pirate, yet she also has to deal with the concepts of motherhood and what it means to be a woman in charge.

At the same time, the deeper we get into the story, the more we see the impacts of colonialism and the West on these people’s lives, and I wanted to see more of that in the end, but it kind of just becomes a detail that’s only making things harder for the main character.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a good historical fiction novel if you view it through that lens. Sure, it has its flaws, but I thought as a novel it worked pretty well and that I was pretty satisfied. I didn’t end up switching off the book while working, which is what I do when I think a novel isn’t that great.

I’ve done that many times before because I don’t believe in wasting my time with something I know I’m not going to like. But anyways, I thought that this was an immersive experience. Pick it up if you are remotely interested in the subject.

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