Frances White: Voyage of the Damned Review

For a thousand years, Concordia has been able to maintain peace between its provinces, protected by a wall known as the Bandage. To mark this incredible feat, the emperor's ship embarks upon a twelve-day voyage to the Go...

For a thousand years, Concordia has been able to maintain peace between its provinces, protected by a wall known as the Bandage. To mark this incredible feat, the emperor's ship embarks upon a twelve-day voyage to the Goddess's mountain.
 

Aboard are the heirs of the twelve provinces of Concordia, each graced with a unique and secret magical ability known as a Blessing.
 

Except one: Ganymedes Piscero - class clown, slacker, and all-round disappointment.
 

When a beloved heir is murdered, everyone is a suspect. Stuck at sea and surrounded by powerful people without a Blessing to protect him, odds of survival are slim.
 

But as the bodies pile higher, Ganymedes must become the hero he was not born to be. Can he unmask the killer and their Blessing before this bloody crusade reaches the shores of Concordia? Or will the empire as he knows it fall?

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Frances White’s debut novel Voyage of the Damned is an ambitiously plotted story that smoothly crosses over across a variety of different genres outside of its main fantasy classification. While definitively a fantasy novel due to its fantastical scale, magical powers and traditional fantasy-realm setting, the story is just as much a whodunit mystery thriller investigation tale (debatably even more than its fantasy-wrapping) as well as a lightly inspired queer romantasy (with asterisks around the romance). Comments summarizing Voyage of the Damned as an Agatha Christie novel dressed up in fantasy outfit is a decent comparison as it definitely gave me faint Murder on the Orient Express vibes, if the Orient Express was a grand and luxurious sailing vessel ala Death on the Nile. However, Voyage of the Damned’s ill-fated events also have compelling political ramifications to the growing body count and a wild last minute plot twist that can either make or break the reading experience depending on the reader’s suspension of disbelief. For me personally, it worked very well, and its ending managed to course-correct and explain nearly every potential plot hole or point of criticism I had while reading the novel. While White’s flavor of character narration occasionally skewed a bit too modern for my taste and the romantic elements often disrupted the overall tone and pacing, I’m more than willing to give them a pass for how solid the mystery thriller murder storyline was crafted and how well most of the other ideas were executed.

Per what’s unfortunately becoming more common in my reviews, let’s address a couple common points of criticism highlighted in many other reviews for this novel. One, the romance is bad and disappointing. While I cover this in more detail later in my review, Voyage of the Damned has a prominent romantasy-esque feel to it and is written in a similar tone to many books in the genre. However, this novel is clearly NOT intended to be a romance-forward fantasy story despite its presence and style. While Dee’s character narration and thirsty eye certainly have a romance flavor, it plays a supportive role in the story and is used primarily for Dee’s character growth and motivations. Second point, the fantasy peninsula kingdom of Concordia and magic system world-building is poor. This is a more complex point of criticism but my response to this is that the world-building is perfectly adequate and does everything it needs to do in order for its mystery thriller storyline and character motivations to work. Unlike traditional fantasy adventure epics, Voyage of the Damned could care less about the time or place of the story as well as the specifics to the Blesseds’ magical powers as these are not relevant to the events and investigation on the Dragon’s Dawn, the Emperor’s ship. What the novel does provide is detailed inter-province politics, the inequality between the upper and lower groups, and magic system details that directly contribute to the culprit’s actions and end goal. These two common points don’t sit well with me as they both seem to criticize the novel for subject areas and priorities it likely wasn’t intended to cover. Additionally, the world-building and continuity details are excellent but require the reader to actually finish the story. Disregard any reviews for this novel that are marked as DNF’s as the last 20% of the book is crucial at tying together all the loose plot threads and themes. On the spoiler-included version of this review on my reading blog, I have an entire section that summarizes my negative impressions felt mid-way through that were fixed or addressed by the end of the book.

With those points aside, Voyage of the Damned has a lot going on, but it’s constantly a refreshing and entertaining ride- erm voyage. While the Kingdom of Concordia is often mentioned, particularly the location and terrain of each province which directly tie in to each other’s political relations, the bulk of the story takes place on a grand, self-sailing, magical ship that makes for a fun and unique setting, not to mention an isolated location cut off from outside help. The ship’s timeless aesthetic has just the right amount of magical qualities that give the story its fantasy vibe while still being appropriately sized for multiple murder scenes. A map is provided for the ship’s various room locations but isn’t really needed due to the simplicity of the story’s plot, though the map of Concordia is very helpful. With magical elements involved, brief spurts of action, and a lot of strategic planning and investigating, there’s a lot to like that will satisfy a huge variety of readers. White’s writing style and tone is also very modern and highly accessible, no doubt explaining why it was popular and trending on booktok.

I briefly touched on this earlier, but one area Voyage of the Damned does particularly well is the way it seamlessly integrates its world-building with the story. With Concordia divided into twelve different provinces (thirteen if you count the area beyond the Bandage border) each represented by a Blessed heir, there’s a lot of material to convey on top of introducing and balancing its huge cast of characters. Remarkably, the story never gets bogged down with world-building and does a consistently great job of introducing relevant details when narratively appropriate. While the main character Ganymedes “Dee” isn’t necessarily ignorant of all of Concordia’s matters, his distaste for the role he is shoved into properly explains his limited knowledge of many traditions and blessed mechanics, allowing the reader to learn along the way with him. The details and clues are presented in a gradual manner, and White does a great job at carefully managing how much the reader is left in the dark at all times without feeling like she’s making up stuff on the fly (compare that to some of my recent reads like Quicksilver or Gideon the Ninth that are far less successful at this).

Though it takes some time to get there, Voyage of the Damned hits its stride once the beloved and powerful heir to the emperor is found dead, her body dramatically crashing down from the elegant ballroom’s ceiling. The murder mystery thriller storyline and investigation are easily the best and most impressive element of the novel for me. Unlike many other murder mysteries, the deaths have seemingly conflicting details/MO’s, and the story also immediately eliminates the possibility of an outside culprit early-on which only intensifies the stakes. One important thing to note is unlike a traditional mystery thriller, the focus isn’t so much as how the killer murdered each heir but why they were targeted. With every heir having some sort of magical power that may or may not be widely known, each new death ups the ante on the culprit’s motivation and goals, and not about the manner of death. As an experienced mystery thriller genre reader, I found this focus fascinating and a nice change of pace. Dee’s investigation is a slow burn that will reward patient readers when the culprit and timeline of events is revealed, along with a crazy plot twist. My suspicions about the culprit were mostly right as well as guessing the mechanism of how the big plot twist is achieved, but I was pleasantly surprised by twist itself and the ending (see TheBookGrind vers. of this review that includes hidden spoilers).

Another positive area of the novel is its handling of the large cast of characters. Featuring twelve heirs of each province, White does a great job of making each one memorable and distinctive with varying personalities, backgrounds, but most importantly, aspirational goals and political motivations. Though, at the beginning of the book many of the provinces seem shallowly written (ie. the ermines being cold abrasive people of the tundra, the tortoises being scholastic brainiacs, the bunnerflies being kind of hippie monks), the inter-province politics relations quickly become far more developed as the story progresses. The way each province handles the treatment and honor of their representative Blessed is hugely varied and even some of the characters that have less screen time have well-written backstories. Additionally, the Voyage of the Damned has excellent Queer representation that hits every letter of LGBTQ+ and almost everyone is at least a little bit bi (the Agatha Christie comparison missed the opportunity of “And Then There were Gays”). Avoiding stereotypical portrayals and featuring a spectrum of different ethnicities (one character is wheelchair-bound and has a stylish head wrap), this is a great example of how to showcase a diverse cast of characters. A common shortcoming of survival, murder mystery stories is the difficulty of balancing so many characters and more importantly, getting the reader to care about each one for their inevitable deaths to have impact. White does a great job with that, somehow even achieving that with the emperor’s heir who is barely alive for three chapters before being found dead. Across the board all the characters are memorable and more often than not, quite likable. And coming in at almost 500 hundred pages, the novel doesn’t rush its story and has plenty of time for the reader to become familiar with its colorful cast.

Quirky, comedic, and entirely self-aware of how flamboyantly lackadaisy he is, Dee’s character makes for a unique and refreshing character voice that is very accessible, particularly for readers who normally would find the murder mystery premise grim or too tense to read. Masquerading his lack of self-worth under the guise of arrogance and humor, his character is well-balanced by an extensive and unfortunate backstory. There’s a notable recurring theme about his self-worth and his lack of wanting to live that comes full circle, both in connection with the Blessed heirs’ voyage, as well as the murder investigation. 

His history with Ravi, as well as his camaraderie turned something more with Wyatt are both well done (though there’s an important note on that, see the spoiler version of this review). And while I was less enthusiastic about his teamwork with Grasshopper, I understand what White was trying to do with her character despite it not necessarily appealing to me personally. Additionally for representation, though it’s handled a bit clunky (Dee being pudgy and round vaguely implied due to his obsession with eating good food might be off putting for the most sensitive readers), I found it very refreshing that the main character and potential love interest were far from being traditionally attractive, fit, or the ever popular and tiring “large, tall, broad with abs of days” type of character. Wyatt, in particular is notable as I can’t remember the last time I read a romance-leaning book where the love interest is skeletally skinny, physically frail, and far from the traditional romance novel character role (outside of stories where they’re supposed to be ill like The Fault in Our Stars). As a teenager who was perpetually skin and bones and had low self-esteem, this would’ve been amazing to read growing up and the recent increasing representation trends are always great to see.

While Voyage of the Damned handles the vast majority of its elements well, there were a few notable nitpicks that held it back from being a perfect hit for me. As mentioned above, the novel is written in a fairly modern contemporary style and Dee’s character voice is quite tongue-in-cheek snarky. While the character itself worked for me most of the time, there were many instances where Dee’s character narration and dialogue disrupted the momentum and intensity of the mystery thriller angle. Part of that may be by design to make the story more accessible, but I frequently found myself wishing Dee would crack less poorly timed jokes which started to get repetitive and tiring. A lot of 1-star reviews criticize Dee’s character narration as a deal-breaker and I can sympathize with it to a point, mainly because I know part of that off-putting impression is by purposeful design. This is meant to establish where the character is internally and how he uses humor as a defense mechanism, walling off everyone after certain notable events in his childhood occur. However, it is nonetheless excessive and clunky in places.

The other notable issue I had with the novel has to do with the romance element of the story. While I liked the intent and direction White was going with the romantic developments, the manner in which it is integrated more often than not came off as being cringy and out of place. Invoking an overly casual tone on-brand with many romantasy novels, Dee’s thirsty wandering eye narration would consistently break the story’s great thriller sections and cheapen the novel as a whole. Particularly in the middle of the story when Dee and Wyatt partner up and start to develop mutual feelings, the romance elements would veer into juvenile and cringy territory, at odds with the rest of the book’s quality. The most offensive example is notably at the end of the story when the fantasy side of the story is resolved, and the book’s traditional falling action section has Dee getting stripped naked and groped by a character who shall not be named for spoilers (on top of a freezing alpine mountain I might add) for utterly no reason except for trashy romantic fanservice. The scene is entirely clean and is considered a closed-door romance, but the decision to include it at that point in the book (or frankly at all) is downright baffling at best, off-putting and a poor lasting impression at worst. And that’s quite tragic as the rest of the book has so much ambition and class. Even worse, Dee’s entire childhood relationship and sort-of-not-really boyfriend history with Ravi is handled with such care and nuance. I read it and made a note “seriously, why? Just why Frances White? If you’re going to commit to this horrible decision, at least let them go all the way.” Even a terrible Michael Bay-style make out session as the credits roll would’ve been a classier way to go.

While I overall enjoyed Voyage of the Damned and appreciated how ambitiously crafted its story was, the actual reading experience mid-way through wasn’t always as positive. I always jot down a lot of notes and highlights when I read books to reference back to when I write my reviews. Interestingly, I had many more negative nitpick notes written while I was reading the novel that ended up being course-corrected or addressed narratively by the end of the story. Below are a few notable spoiler-filled examples:

While there are some elements that weren’t quite my cup of tea, overwhelmingly Voyage of the Damned gets far more of them right. Great on its own if judged as a mystery thriller, as a crossover fantasy and romance novel featuring excellent representation, it’s even more noteworthy considering how much can go wrong with such a busy premise. The fact that this is also Frances White’s debut novel and a fully self-contained standalone story as opposed to the more common fantasy series setup is incredibly impressive. Accessibly written, refreshingly creative, and most importantly well plotted, Voyage of the Damned is great and a rare booktok recommendation that I actually enjoyed!