The Cartographers

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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“What do you know about that?” she asked.

"Not much,” Nell lied. “Ramona told me it was destroyed a long time ago.”

Eve grimaced. “It was dangerous, that thing. Cursed. Everyone who touched it got hurt.” Her eyes drifted back to the compass rose symbol. “And it’s still not over.”

WHAT'S THE CARTOGRAPHERS ABOUT?

This is hard—I tried to describe this to some friends earlier, and I tripped over myself so many times while trying to make this sound enticing while not giving anything away. I'd call that conversation a rough draft of this section, but it was so bad that Anne Lamott's going to have to revise the section in Bird by Bird about sh***y first drafts.

Nell Young has had a life-long obsession with maps—her parents have doctorates in cartography and it might as well have been encoded in her DNA. She and her boyfriend had internships in the New York Public Library where her father works, too. Then one day, she finds a couple of maps in a forgotten corner of the Library, one of which is an old gas station map. Her father flips out over what she found, for reasons she can't really understand—a major argument ensues and she's fired. So is Felix, her boyfriend. Not just that, but her father goes on to wage a war on their reputations—they're finished in academia.

Felix leaves the field and Nell goes to work for an Internet company making faux historical maps. Years pass without Nell speaking to her father, then he dies suddenly. While looking through his office, Nell finds that gas station map and is flabbergasted. Why would he keep that thing?

Nell starts asking questions and learning things about her family, and a whole lot more.

VISUAL AIDS

As is fitting for a book about maps, the novel has some. Not many, most of the ones in the book are described, not seen. But there are just enough—the important ones—to ensure the reader can visualize what's going on—we see what Nell and the rest see.

It's a great touch—I love that Shepherd included those—I'm one of those fantasy readers who rarely glances at the maps in those books—but I spent time on these.

I COULDN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT...

Last week, I quipped that this book was "very Mr. Penumbra-esque." This was too blithe and flippant. And yet...I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Shepherd doesn't write anything like Sloan, the worlds are completely different, and the way they approach character and narrative don't really overlap. Really I think the only thing I can point to that is a demonstrable similarity is the way that they approach Big Tech companies—but this novel's Haberson Global is more like the company in Sourdough, anyway, so I'm not sure it counts.

Again, I couldn't stop thinking about Mr. Penumbra’s 24‑Hour Bookstore. It's about some dedicated and brilliant people whose passion for and pursuit of something that everyone else in the world pretty much takes for granted. There's a little more to it, but I'd have to spoil stuff about both books, so I'm not going to get into it.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE CARTOGRAPHERS?

I never, not for one minute, thought that a book about maps and mapmakers would be this riveting. And I was wrong. Not that I've spent that much time thinking about books about mapmakers, but you get the idea.

I've read some pretty strong thrillers that weren't as gripping as this. Shepherd paced this perfectly and kept building the tension in just the right manner. Even when I got to the point where I'd figured everything out—even the mind-bendy bits—and was just waiting for Nell and the rest to catch up, I was on the edge of my seat. That tension extends to things that happened before the novel's present time—we'd get chapters of first-person narration from some of Nell's father's friends from when she was a toddler. I knew where certain characters would end up because you'd met them already—but that didn't make the uncertainty about what was going to happen to them in the memory much easier to take.

But this isn't just a thriller—it's a story about a family. One of the sweetest, strangest, and saddest found families you're going to run into. A mantra that runs throughout this book the way Uncle Ben's "With great power..." runs through certain movies* is that the purpose of a map is to connect people. The way that these people are connected would be difficult to map out—the routes certainly are intricate and varied—but the connections are strong and lasting.

* Yes, I know it's from the comics first—but the comics rarely, if ever, beat that drum the way some of the movies do.

I was less than satisfied with the ending—because I thought it was headed somewhere else, and then it seemed to aim in a different direction, and it ended up in a third. I think the expectation problems are all mine, they're not from the text. I'm also sure that the ending we get is stronger than what I expected. Still, it's hard to for me accept what we got since I'd spent 100 or so pages sure we were getting something else.

None of that changes the bottom line of this post—you're going to want to read this book. I strongly recommend it. There are few books like it in the world, and that's a shame. But it means that there's every reason to read this.

How could I just like and not love a book about historians, BIPOC found family, and adventure? Read on.

Anyone who gets excited over anything historic, vintage, and "the smell of old pages" would probably enjoy this book too if they can overlook the plot holes, underdeveloped characters, awkward pacing. The most glaring plot hole was the flimsy reasoning behind Tam choosing to leave her husband and daughter and stay in Agloe--choosing a map and an empty town over easing her daughter? That's rich.

For the first third of the book, I was so invested in Nell, a shunned map conservator/researcher/copier (she didn't create official maps from scratch so she's not a cartographer), so when the book split into 5+ first-person perspectives I almost didn't want to finish.

Narrative focus wavered many more times with too many characters launching into random flashbacks, which made me want two different books or at least a longer, more linear story to properly develop all The Cartographers.

Then, this book's first half turned into a game of Clue, which turned already underdeveloped characters into caricatures. There were too many moments (grocery store-cooking flashback anyone?) when the pacing was *just* getting good only to be pulled back into a slow, drawn-out flashback.

The magical realism was definitely a high point, but the rules were too vague. There were just more than a few things that pulled me out of the story, especially the map mechanics.

The tertiary characters like Snow and Humphrey were some of my favorites too, but some of the love triangles seemed too contrived--some characters didn't show romantic interest until it was convenient for the story.

The interplay between Nell and The Cartographers when all the cards were on the table was also entertaining, but it took until 66% of the book to get there. I also loved the reveals of some of the Cartographers' true identities.

I loved a lot of things about this book, and I really wanted to love it overall, but I had to settle for just liking this book instead.