Book Review: The Cartographers

From The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd:

Amazon

"It was an open-and-shut case, they’d determined. Dr. Young had been alone—the security cameras in the Map Division didn’t turn on until the last employee in the department had clocked out, but they had already been running in the lobby since closing time the night before. The only reported movement was from the security guard on patrol, who had been the one to find him when he’d peeked in on his last loop around the library, sometime in the early hours of dawn."

---

Book Review: The Cartographers.

"The Cartographers" is a mystery, not so much a murder mystery, but a mystery about a map at the heart of a series of murders. The main character is Nell, a young woman estranged from her father, the esteemed head of the New York Public Library's Maps Division. The family falling out dates to an incident about that map. Her discovery of the old gas station road map in her father's personal effects after his death sends her on a high stakes investigation to understand just why this one seemingly worthless map is so important to so many people. Could there be something magical about it? Why yes, yes there is.

I'm a big fan of magical realism as practiced by Haruki Murakami. In Murakami's works, fantastical events occur within an ordinary setting without being treated as extraordinary. That's not the case here. The magic associated with this one old gas station map may be a mystery to all, but everyone treats the magic as extraordinary. Figuring out how the magic works and whose lives have been affected by it, when and how, is what the mystery is all about.

Maybe it takes too long for Shepherd's characters to catch on that the magic is indeed real, or at least longer than most readers need. Maybe her characters' insistence on keeping the magic secret even as characters start dying strains credulity. Maybe everyone eventually accepts that the mystery is real without ever really trying to understand the nature of the magic. Maybe this group of cartographers needed to have at least one scientist among them. These would be tough plot problems for any novelist to deal with. Shepherd doesn't quite solve them, but put them aside and her story is an entertaining read anyway.

Grade: B-

---

P.S. Some of the novel takes place on the campus of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the school I graduated from. In passing, a character says,

I found myself combing through city records online again, this time for Madison, Wisconsin, looking at blueprints and municipal service plans of the university. I hoped I was wrong, but after everything that had happened, I feared the worst. And then I found it. There was a trap room in the science building at our old university, on an 1886 construction map. A utility closet that had been planned, but never built, because the classrooms had expanded in a later draft. It was one floor down from the faculty offices.

Source: The Cartographers.

This reminded me of a "secret" room that my group of friends knew about in Science Hall. Apparently, we weren't the only ones who were in on this secret. A Google search led to this story about it in the Wisconsin Alumni Association online magazine:

Q. When I was in grad school from 1969 to 1971, my friends and I used to go up to the fourth floor of the old Science Hall and slide down the outside fire escape pipe. I know that Science Hall still exists, but do students still take that ride?
— Kay Domine MA'71 and Bill Goodrich '83, MS'91

A. The Science Hall fire chute was a forbidden thrill for many UW students up until the early 1980s, when it was replaced with large escape stairways in the two rear corner towers. The fire chute zig-zagged down the west façade of the north wing, a vertical drop of approximately 50 feet. Adventurous students would climb to the third floor and jump into the spiral metal tunnel, sliding in the dark to the courtyard below.

Source: Wisconsin Alumni Association.

---

"The Cartographers" is available from the Richardson Public Library. :-)