I found this an enjoyable reading experience, but it definitely wasn’t a perfect read for me. I’m gonna need to talk spoilers to get my full thoughts out, but they’ll be marked. But first, non-spoilery thoughts.
Obviously you know from the title that this is a book about maps, and people who make, study, and collect maps. It’s also about family, secrets, magic, and murder. Our main character is Nell, whose mother died in a fire when she was a small child, and whose father works in the maps department of the New York Public Library. Both of them were cartographers by education and trade. Nell becomes a cartographer, too, and one day when working in the NYPL she finds an old map that she begins to look into, but when her father learns of it, he blows up at her, fires her, and ruins her career. She is suddenly no longer a cartographer and doesn’t speak to her father again. Years later, her father is murdered in the middle of the night in the library, and the map that was supposedly worthless is found among his prized possessions. And now Nell finds that other copies of this map are sought after, and killed for. What the hell is going on?
So the first half of this book was excellent for me. I couldn’t understand why it had been getting such mixed reviews. It’s suspenseful, it’s weird, it’s kind of freaky. The map stuff was really cool. The fact that Nell had been fired—by her dad!—from her dream job, her career ruined, her once close relationship with her only remaining parent severed, and for such weird reasons, was very interesting and emotionally engaging. The disappearing maps were great. The library setting was right up my alley. And then we started getting answers.
First, the one thing that I think worked extremely well was SPOILERS the idea that mapmaking is magic, and that by mapping something you can make it real. This has real-world applications, like inventing secret rooms to hide in, or secret doors to get in and out of places, or secret buildings to keep your location safe END SPOILERS. But when we found out what was actually going on, and what the project was that the group of Nell’s parents colleagues and friends/family were working on, I was so underwhelmed. The “project” seemed really nebulous and like a weird thing for a group of adults to spend their life on.
First of all, every single cartographer in this book is SO SURPRISED when SPOILERS Agloe, NY turns out to be real, and not only that, none of them ever seem to have heard of it. I know absolute zero about maps, and even I know about paper towns/phantom settlements on maps, and I most definitely know about Agloe, NY, the most infamous one. I get that the author was going for a story that evoked the real-life phenomenon of Agloe becoming a real place after it was put on the map, but this just rang false to me. And then, that all these scholars would think anyone would believe them about this fantastical town . . . or that it had any real-world applications at all. Like, what are you going to do with a fake town? Seriously? If you guys have answers, I would love to hear them END SPOILERS.
Oh, and also, Nell’s boyfriend has POV but that whole arc felt pointless and underdeveloped. I feel like he was only included as a character because he SPOILERS worked for the bad guy and gave us another POV into that are of the story END SPOILERS.
So yeah, a mixed bag. I will definitely read more books from Peng Shepherd, though!
Chipping Away at Mt. TBR, July 2022—Book 19/31
