Maps are cool. All of us fantasy readers know this: most of us know the maps of Middle-earth or Westeros or Earthsea as well or better as the map of boring old regular Earth. Maps inspire the imagination. Every one of us has, at some point, looked at a map for a fantasy book and wondered about the places shown that haven’t been seen. What’s this “Fornost” place up north of Bree? Or Mount Gundabad at the northern end of the Misty Mountains? Why are they significant enough that Tolkien put them on the map? When will we get to see them? But of course we never see every place, and we don’t really want to. Because when all the “Here There Be Dragons” places on the maps get explored, and they become, say, Ohio, the mystery is gone.
The protagonist of this book (Nell) is a cartographer, same as her father is and her late mother was. She’s working a crappy job making cheap kitschy reproductions of old maps because her father, who works in the New York Public Library’s prestigious Map Collection, got her fired from NYPL because of a screaming fight some years before. So when her father suddenly dies, and she finds one subject of that fight (a cheap, outdated, thoroughly unremarkable gas station map of upstate New York) carefully tucked away, she naturally is curious as to why.
Two stories unfold as the book progresses: while Nell investigates this seemingly worthless map her father so obviously cared about, she also pieces together the story of what happened with her parents when she was a baby that led to her mother’s death in a fire.
This book was a lot of fun to read, and I burned through it quickly. It’s very well written and very imaginative. My chief complaint is that the characterization didn’t feel great to me - not bad, just not great. There were places where it felt like characters made the decisions they did because the plot required them to, not because it was a decision that made sense for that person in that moment. I also never really felt sold on the danger posed by the opposing forces - it felt like the actual threat faced didn’t merit the fear and intimidation it inspired. But these are fairly minor complaints, and this book was an easy 4 stars.
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