A Million to One

Overview

Set aboard the RMS Titanic, this novel follows Josefa, a confident young con artist who has set her sights on the ship's most heavily guarded treasure: the Rubáiyát, a gem-encrusted manuscript worth a fortune. Rather than target the wealthy passengers filling first class, she wants the one object valuable enough to change her life for good.

To pull off the theft, Josefa recruits three girls whose skills fill the gaps in her own: an acrobat capable of slipping through tight spaces, an actress skilled at deception, and an artist who can forge the manuscript's likeness by hand. The four come from different backgrounds and have little reason to trust one another, but the job binds them together.

As the plan unfolds, old grudges, a growing romance, and small missteps start to strain the group's fragile alliance. The looming presence of the ship's fate hangs over every chapter, giving the heist a ticking clock that has nothing to do with getting caught.

A Heist Story in the Shadow of Disaster

The novel borrows the structure of a classic ensemble caper — assembling a crew, casing a target, executing an elaborate plan — and transplants it onto one of history's most famous sinking ships. That juxtaposition is the book's central device: readers know from the outset how the voyage ends, which turns every scene of scheming and romance into something shadowed by inevitability.

The story also uses its heist framework to explore found family and trust among its four central characters, each an outsider in her own way. Their partnership, forged out of necessity rather than affection, becomes the emotional core beneath the plot's mechanics of disguise, timing, and nerve. By pairing a tightly plotted crime story with a backdrop readers already carry emotional weight about, the novel positions itself within a genre that reimagines historical settings through the lens of adventure fiction, while still asking what its characters owe each other when the stakes turn from theft to survival.

Why A Million to One Has Been Challenged

Much of the scrutiny directed at this novel centers on the relationship that develops between two of its female characters as the heist progresses. Some challenges to the book, which has drawn objections in 1 state and 1 school district within this catalog, single out that same-sex romantic thread as inappropriate content for young readers, treating its presence as reason enough to restrict access regardless of the surrounding heist narrative.

Other objections point to the criminal nature of the plot itself — a story that asks readers to root for thieves — arguing that framing theft as a daring, sympathetic enterprise sends the wrong message to teenage readers. Taken together, the challenges reflect a broader pattern in which books featuring LGBTQ+ characters or morally ambiguous protagonists face removal requests disproportionate to their content, even when the material is presented within a clearly fictional adventure frame.