A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix

Overview

Set in 1826, as the era of organized piracy along the South China Sea draws to a close, this young adult novel follows Xiang, a girl raised on stories of the fearsome Dragon Fleet and its enigmatic commander, the Head of the Dragon. Xiang has spent her life in the shadow of two absences: a mother too consumed by business to give her much attention, and a father who died before she was born, leaving behind only a gold pendant.

When a girl named Anh steals that pendant and returns it only after enlisting Xiang's help to decipher a scrap of map hidden inside, Xiang learns her father's true history — and stumbles into a hunt for a fortune long dismissed as legend. She joins Anh's crew and sets sail, only to discover that the ocean and the people who command it are far more perilous than the tales ever suggested.

The novel is part of the Remixed Classics series, in which writers from underrepresented backgrounds reimagine canonical literature. Here, the source material is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, reworked around two queer teenage girls of color and a setting drawn from Chinese and Vietnamese seafaring history rather than the original's British colonial framework.

Reworking a Classic Adventure

Rather than simply relocating Stevenson's plot, the novel builds its treasure hunt around the historical figure of Ching Shih, a real pirate leader who commanded a vast fleet in the early nineteenth century. That grounding gives the story's central mystery — a hidden map, a dead father's secret past, a fortune built from decades of plunder — a texture distinct from the genre's more familiar Anglo-European pirate mythology. Food, language, and family obligation are woven through the adventure alongside its romance and swordplay, and critics have noted the book's attention to imperialism and the costs of the outlaw life it romanticizes.

Within the wider Remixed Classics series, the book sits alongside other retellings of foundational Western texts told from perspectives largely absent in the originals. Its author, known for young adult fiction centering queer characters of color, brings that same lens to a genre — high-seas adventure — not typically associated with either queer protagonists or non-European settings.

Why A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have centered on its portrayal of a romantic and physical relationship between its two teenage female protagonists. Challenges of this kind typically target the book's LGBTQ+ content directly, arguing that depictions of same-sex attraction and intimacy between minors are inappropriate for the young adult shelf, or seeking to restrict the book's access based on the sexual orientation of its central characters. The novel's setting amid piracy and violence has occasionally been cited alongside these concerns, though the core of the objection has generally been its queer romance rather than its adventure-story elements. The catalog tracks this title as challenged in 2 states and 2 districts.