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emmonsannae's review
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
I’d really wanted to read this book for a long time, and it wasn’t an unenjoyable read, but I was disappointed by it. The story is promising and is an easy read. The premise is so intriguing! Its actual book was a bit of a letdown, though. The writing is a bit clumsy with a lot of telling rather than showing. I didn’t feel that words were used especially well—they were used in a utilitarian way to produce the story, but because of this they ended up taking away from the story. I ended up reflecting a lot while reading on how many other authors (even “non-literary” ones) fit language to their own ends so smoothly and effectively that we often don’t notice the artistry to what they’re doing.
Most importantly, I felt the author took advantage of readers’ suspended disbelief by choosing not to explain key elements, which meant I was never fully bought in to what the plot was doing. And it was predictable—I guessed the major plot twist about 100 pages in. The characters were also fairly one-dimensional. Their motivations felt unbelievable and contrived for the sake of the narrative. Ultimately, I just didn’t feel like the book was well-written. It’s such a great idea for a story, though—I enjoyed the creativity of it very much.
Most importantly, I felt the author took advantage of readers’ suspended disbelief by choosing not to explain key elements, which meant I was never fully bought in to what the plot was doing. And it was predictable—I guessed the major plot twist about 100 pages in. The characters were also fairly one-dimensional. Their motivations felt unbelievable and contrived for the sake of the narrative. Ultimately, I just didn’t feel like the book was well-written. It’s such a great idea for a story, though—I enjoyed the creativity of it very much.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Murder, Alcohol, Death, Death of parent, and Fire/Fire injury
hello_lovely13's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and Death
Moderate: Infidelity, Murder, and Gun violence
3mmers's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
The Cartographers is bad, and bad in ways that are above all else confusing. I don’t like to criticize books based on ‘plotholes’ because I think it’s a half-baked critique that is the last refuge of those determined to find anything to hate about a work. I aspire to be better at hating. But the fact remains, the plot of The Cartographers just does not hang together. Like a late Monet painting, when seen from afar you might just be able to discern a structure, but look more closely and you start to wonder if the image in this mess had been a fabrication of your own mind the entire time. Monet had a master’s command of brush-strokes and colour, even when he lacked sight, and all The Cartographers has is genuinely the worst wordcraft of any literary fiction book I’ve ever read. Nothing about this novel makes sense. I do not understand why anyone would want to read it, and frankly I don’t understand why anyone would want to write this either.
There’s one detail of The Cartographers that is a good microcosm of everything that doesn’t work. The book uses the rhetorical question “what is the purpose of a map?” as a shortcut for character expression; various characters give their own meaningful answers to it in a way that shows their unique outlook. I find this mind-numbingly stupid. First off, having all the characters offer different answers to the same question is such an elementary level way of conveying character it feels like it was written by an AI. All the characters have to offer are obvious and trite responses pulled from The Dullard’s Book of Vagueries. “It brings people together.” “It lets you control things.” Give me a fucking break. Second, lame and amateurish as rhetorical questions might be, this doesn’t even function as one because it has a single correct answer. A map is a tool to find things. That’s it. If you want a single question to do the heavy lifting of character development for you than at least choose something with potentially profound answers!
The more you look at this the more problems appear. Why do the characters care what a map is for when the importance of purpose to the format of a map never comes up in the plot? Why do a bunch of cartography specialists have such clearly delineated answers to such a rudimentary question? Why does the book come back to it so obviously, like it is looking over its shoulder to see if we are taking notes? It’s holes all the way down.
In an attempt to prise some sort of structure from this rat king of technical failure, and also because I don’t think this book is worth your time, I’m going to present a full summary of the plot, followed by why I hated it.
Disgraced cartographer Nell Young is languishing in an unfulfilling job making pop art wall maps when her estranged father — who chased her out of the cartography field and of his life seven years prior — suddenly dies. Nell is able to recover his prize possession: the document holder from her long and tragically dead mother. To her surprise, all it contains is the same map that her father blew up their relationship and her professional life over. The thing is, it’s an unimpressive specimen, a mass produced road map that is cartographically generic. With the help of her ex-boyfriend (another casualty of the incident) and the fantasy-google tech company he now works for, Nell discovers that the map commands truly irrational prices among private collectors and rumours of pursuit by a shadow-y group of counter-bidders called the Cartographers.
The map’s secret: a phantom settlement, an inaccuracy between the map and real life, a town that does not exist. Unless. If you loyally follow the map, rather than the terrain or your intuition, you can find it.
Initially skeptical, Nell tracks down her father’s friends and discovers that while most of them have sadly moved on from the accident that ended their friendship and her mother’s life, one of them never let it go and continues to obsessively hunt copies of the map to control all the keys to this magical town. Is it the secretive surveillance tech CEO who keeps popping up replacing paper records with an online data-harvesting project to create the perfect map of all human activity? Yes. Obviously.
Through a circuitous series of flashbacks in which each of the elder generation reveals more about how their earlier discovery of the phantom settlement tore their lives apart, Nell and company return to the magical town of Aglo and discover that Nell’s mother is still alive — she faked her death back in the day (do not ask why because it will not make sense) — and the CEO guy is suddenly way more evil than even being a surveillance tech CEO would imply. Unfortunately what Nell does not discover is what about this situation would be in any way emotional meaningful. The climax devolves into a bizarre deus ex map-ina in which Nell rewrites the Aglo map in order to remove the town from its current location entirely, taking her with it. There’s a conclusion that implies that this was a good and hopeful thing for her to do, and then the book unceremoniously ends.
The Cartographers is retrospective in nature; Nell rediscovers the events that set her current pursuit by the villain into motion. Rather than Nell discovering documentation of the events and putting the details together, the reader is treated to a roughly consecutive series of flashbacks framed as retellings by the characters who would have been present back then. And readers, they are long.
I can’t confirm this because I only listened to the audiobook, but each one of these digressions feels at least twice as long as a regular chapter. They play very loosely with the premise that they are retellings within Nell’s perspective and operate much more like a new point of view character. This is a huge limitation on the story. The book is split between two timelines: the present day and the past, and the latter is much more interesting. I found myself checking the timestamp to see how close I was to a flashback. Here’s a question: why isn’t the book just about Nell’s parents? The flashbacks have clear motivations and clear stakes; we know why the characters are doing what they’re doing (desire to preserve a clearly expired relationship by embarking on a frankly ridiculous project) and what would happen should they fail (complete estrangement). There’s even the dramatic irony of knowing that all their efforts will inevitably fail. Nell’s current timeline is mostly just baffling bad behaviour. It completely lacks a coherent motivation or stakes, and feels more like the electric cable connecting a string of Christmas lights. Her sections are generally more poorly paced than the flashbacks too.
Nell’s timeline is where the worst of the book’s plotholes appear. The big one is that the drama of this magical map just didn’t read for me at all. We are expected to believe that this map commands a preternatural degree of obsession in just about anyone. Every single major character blows up their entire life at one point or another over it but it is really just a map. The book is at great pains to emphasize how normal it first appears. I initially expected that there would be a straight-up magical explanation for this obsession, like the One Ring for an even more niche breed of geeks, but no justification is forthcoming. Without a clear understanding of why the map still commands the obsession of our main cast, the timeline has little to recommend it. While I get that it would be a superbly boring book if Nell handed the map over to the police and the story ended in chapter one, I do like my novels to work a little harder to sell the plot to me. As it is, there is never a reason to not just pack it in and go home.
Speaking of motivations, they are not revealed until literally the last three chapters. And even then it doesn’t make sense. Nell really never has a motivation beyond stop evil tech CEO Wally (as a sidenote, ‘Wally’ is a terrible name for a reclusive villain that we’re expected to take seriously as all the other characters ask ‘Where’s Wally?’), but a big weakness of her arc is that it is never clear why stopping him would be necessary. Is one weirdo having exclusive access to the model town hidden in a defunct road map really that much of a big deal? There is never a good reason for Nell to pursue the map the way she does, other than It Is a Novel and She Is the Protagonist, which makes her feel artificial as a character.
At the end of the novel, we learn that the town is not only accessible exclusively via the map, it exists only on the map. The Cartographers slips between the map being a sort of portal to a town to the town only existing because of the map without ever acknowledging that transition. Explanations that that change in small but meaningful ways over the course of the novel without this ever being pointed out is a consistent problem towards the end of the story. It makes the ending of an already convoluted story even more difficult to follow. Because the town exists only on the map, this means that its content is determined by the map, somehow. So if a person wants the town to have, say, an ice cream parlour, or a hospital, or a combined bdsm club/mini-golf course, they could add it to the map and it would appear as in real life. Second, because this town is determined by the map, adding this map to Wally’s digital surveillance map (a fantasy google map that integrates a wide variety of data) would combine representation and determination and allow him to CONTROL THE WORLD (Bond villain cackle).
Let’s acknowledge how insane it is for the book to go from, ‘this guy wants the map as the last reminder of the woman he loved’ to ‘this guy wants the map to control the world because this is a fucking batman novel now’, and move on. That’s what the book does.
This is the stakes of the whole plot! It can be fine for a book to not explain something like this. It’s a magic map that works by magic or midichlorians or whatever. The problem is that the way this map works is a crucial component of the book’s climax. In order to understand the urgency behind why Nell needs to do all this I am being asked to dismiss my entire understanding of how data driven surveillance works as well as my understanding of the book’s own continuity to take on faith an explanation it pulled out of its ass at the eleventh hour. The problem is that The Cartographers backfills its whole raison d’etre with a justification that doesn’t really make sense in context and is introduced too late to work as a narrative construct. The ability of the Aglo map to determine the layout of the town and for that to be extended to the entire world needed to be established early.
Like let’s be clear, books aren’t real, an author can write anything they want and the restriction is how well it serves the narrative, and this late game bond villain-esque speech doesn’t work narratively, which leads us to questioning the practicality of it. The stakes of the novel are a super important part of why plots do or do not connect and resonate with readers. Stakes don’t have to be high — you can have low stakes stories so long as it is clear why they matter to the protagonist — but they are non-negotiable. The Cartographers hides its stakes until literally the third last chapter. Preventing Wally from using maps to control the world is, in isolation, an understandable motivation, but we don’t find out about it until after the characters have made basically every choice they can.
The lack of a coherent explanation for any of this behaviour leaves a huge hole in the narrative, but this poor climax isn’t the only plothole in town. There are a lot of things the characters do that have authorial endorsement so they slide by without a mention, that are, when you actually think about them, deeply fucked up.Why is Nell such a contrarian asshole that she got her boyfriend fired? Bear lies to his friends and puts himself into debt collection so they can spend the summer together. It’s presented as misguided but ultimately sweet, but, lets be real, its creepy and dangerously codependent. Wally has been a possessive stalked from day one. Nell’s mother Tamara abandons her husband and toddler daughter to… make a map? When you give any of these characters a second thought, none of their actions make any sense.
The obvious rebuttals are that they are motivated by emotion and that people do shitty things sometimes. My problem with both is that these are such extreme behaviours that they require a very good justification. Having a big enough argument that you get yourself fired is understandable, taking it far enough to pull your boyfriend banished from the field too? That’s not reasonable. From a different angle, firing your daughter for talking back and taking an argument too far? Curmudgeonly but understandable. Firing her boyfriend too and preventing both of them from holding a job in their field over it? Nightmare behaviour. This is all given authorial sanction too. Nell isn’t presented as a low empathy obsessive, she is presented as deserving a change to get back with her boyfriend whose life she ruined. All the characters as supposed to be well-meaning people who took things a little too far. The clash between that intention and the actual product — a bunch of assholes making incomprehensible choices because the narrative demands it — makes it hard to even enjoy the melodrama.
Once you start looking for plotholes, you don’t stop finding them. Think too hard about the character motivations and you realize that the map didn’t even matter at all. While the crazy research project that brings these characters to Aglo exacerbates their problems, everything that leads to their eventual dissolution pre-dates it.Wally was creepy and possessive before they all even met. Bear had been insecure as long as he’d known the rest of the group. Francis and Eve cheated before they ever found the map. This is just another literary fiction melodrama set over way too long a time period based on the idea that something realistic is inherently more meaningful and artistic than a more inventive fiction wearing the face of a magical realism book. The final cruel twist is that the town isn’t even that interesting! The Cartographers goes out of its way to emphasize how mundane and everyday this place is. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I can’t emphasize how huge a disappointment the town reveal was. It’s just… nothing. This could work! House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielski uses the eerieness of empty impossible locations to invoke existential horror. Abandoned towns are creepy, abandoned towns out of reality especially so. This is just a bunch of unhappy college grads discovering a model town. I don’t know why someone would want their story to be like this.
A weak plot isn’t necessarily a death sentence for a book, even for a miserable critic such as myself. There’s a lot to love about vibes based books. The thing is, vibes based books, the good ones at least, usually have something else going for them. The Cartographers’ fatal flaw is that it has nothing to redeem its shitty plot and artificial characters. You probably thought the concept of a secret town hidden in a misprinted map sounded pretty cool. Me too, but wrong! Aglo is an empty movie set of 1930s pre-fab homes with nothing in it to discover but all the places you’ve already been that were too boring to remember. Does it have themes and messages? Sure, I guess. But these are so poorly executed that they’re hard to even entertain critically. The final answer to the map question is that, ‘a map is something that brings people together,’ but Nell only resolves the plot by apparently permanently removing herself from this plane of existence. Nothing about the book is effective because at a foundational level the wordcraft just isn’t good. The nadir is the sentence, ‘he’d been standing in a puddle, his shoes soaked to the bone.’ What the hell. Bone-shoes aside, the prose is bland and repetitive. Maybe its good that we don’t get to much figurative language if shoes with bones is where that will lead us, but the plain text resorts exclusively to repetition for emphasis. It never says anything in one sentence that it could say in three. And then again two paragraphs later. Nell shuddered. She felt sad and afraid. She thought about how strange it was that she was in this situation. Kill me now. I don’t know if any of the elements I’ve complained about in this screed could be fixed because the simple technique of stringing words into sentences is so poor.
I read a lot of books that I do not like but that I can easily discern why someone else would like them. The romantasy genre in general and Sarah J. Maas’s ouevre in particular are just not for me, but I do understand the appeal of diverse re-skins of the same fantasy boyfriend. But The Cartographers has me stumped because I just do not understand why anyone would want to write this. I don’t get why the melodrama of an aging friend group rolling itself over to the next generation is story-worthy. I don’t understand why the mundanity of the town is emphasized so much, as if the author is afraid that this will be mistaken for one of those embarrassing genre novels. I hope Shepherd got something out of this, because I sure didn’t.
There’s one detail of The Cartographers that is a good microcosm of everything that doesn’t work. The book uses the rhetorical question “what is the purpose of a map?” as a shortcut for character expression; various characters give their own meaningful answers to it in a way that shows their unique outlook. I find this mind-numbingly stupid. First off, having all the characters offer different answers to the same question is such an elementary level way of conveying character it feels like it was written by an AI. All the characters have to offer are obvious and trite responses pulled from The Dullard’s Book of Vagueries. “It brings people together.” “It lets you control things.” Give me a fucking break. Second, lame and amateurish as rhetorical questions might be, this doesn’t even function as one because it has a single correct answer. A map is a tool to find things. That’s it. If you want a single question to do the heavy lifting of character development for you than at least choose something with potentially profound answers!
The more you look at this the more problems appear. Why do the characters care what a map is for when the importance of purpose to the format of a map never comes up in the plot? Why do a bunch of cartography specialists have such clearly delineated answers to such a rudimentary question? Why does the book come back to it so obviously, like it is looking over its shoulder to see if we are taking notes? It’s holes all the way down.
In an attempt to prise some sort of structure from this rat king of technical failure, and also because I don’t think this book is worth your time, I’m going to present a full summary of the plot, followed by why I hated it.
The Cartographers is retrospective in nature; Nell rediscovers the events that set her current pursuit by the villain into motion. Rather than Nell discovering documentation of the events and putting the details together, the reader is treated to a roughly consecutive series of flashbacks framed as retellings by the characters who would have been present back then. And readers, they are long.
I can’t confirm this because I only listened to the audiobook, but each one of these digressions feels at least twice as long as a regular chapter. They play very loosely with the premise that they are retellings within Nell’s perspective and operate much more like a new point of view character. This is a huge limitation on the story. The book is split between two timelines: the present day and the past, and the latter is much more interesting. I found myself checking the timestamp to see how close I was to a flashback. Here’s a question: why isn’t the book just about Nell’s parents? The flashbacks have clear motivations and clear stakes; we know why the characters are doing what they’re doing (desire to preserve a clearly expired relationship by embarking on a frankly ridiculous project) and what would happen should they fail (complete estrangement). There’s even the dramatic irony of knowing that all their efforts will inevitably fail. Nell’s current timeline is mostly just baffling bad behaviour. It completely lacks a coherent motivation or stakes, and feels more like the electric cable connecting a string of Christmas lights. Her sections are generally more poorly paced than the flashbacks too.
Nell’s timeline is where the worst of the book’s plotholes appear. The big one is that the drama of this magical map just didn’t read for me at all. We are expected to believe that this map commands a preternatural degree of obsession in just about anyone. Every single major character blows up their entire life at one point or another over it but it is really just a map. The book is at great pains to emphasize how normal it first appears. I initially expected that there would be a straight-up magical explanation for this obsession, like the One Ring for an even more niche breed of geeks, but no justification is forthcoming. Without a clear understanding of why the map still commands the obsession of our main cast, the timeline has little to recommend it. While I get that it would be a superbly boring book if Nell handed the map over to the police and the story ended in chapter one, I do like my novels to work a little harder to sell the plot to me. As it is, there is never a reason to not just pack it in and go home.
Speaking of motivations, they are not revealed until literally the last three chapters. And even then it doesn’t make sense. Nell really never has a motivation beyond stop evil tech CEO Wally (as a sidenote, ‘Wally’ is a terrible name for a reclusive villain that we’re expected to take seriously as all the other characters ask ‘Where’s Wally?’), but a big weakness of her arc is that it is never clear why stopping him would be necessary. Is one weirdo having exclusive access to the model town hidden in a defunct road map really that much of a big deal? There is never a good reason for Nell to pursue the map the way she does, other than It Is a Novel and She Is the Protagonist, which makes her feel artificial as a character.
At the end of the novel,
This is the stakes of the whole plot! It can be fine for a book to not explain something like this. It’s a magic map that works by magic or midichlorians or whatever. The problem is that the way this map works is a crucial component of the book’s climax. In order to understand the urgency behind why Nell needs to do all this I am being asked to dismiss my entire understanding of how data driven surveillance works as well as my understanding of the book’s own continuity to take on faith an explanation it pulled out of its ass at the eleventh hour. The problem is that The Cartographers backfills its whole raison d’etre with a justification that doesn’t really make sense in context and is introduced too late to work as a narrative construct. The ability of the Aglo map to determine the layout of the town and for that to be extended to the entire world needed to be established early.
Like let’s be clear, books aren’t real, an author can write anything they want and the restriction is how well it serves the narrative, and this late game bond villain-esque speech doesn’t work narratively, which leads us to questioning the practicality of it. The stakes of the novel are a super important part of why plots do or do not connect and resonate with readers. Stakes don’t have to be high — you can have low stakes stories so long as it is clear why they matter to the protagonist — but they are non-negotiable. The Cartographers hides its stakes until literally the third last chapter. Preventing Wally from using maps to control the world is, in isolation, an understandable motivation, but we don’t find out about it until after the characters have made basically every choice they can.
The lack of a coherent explanation for any of this behaviour leaves a huge hole in the narrative, but this poor climax isn’t the only plothole in town. There are a lot of things the characters do that have authorial endorsement so they slide by without a mention, that are, when you actually think about them, deeply fucked up.
The obvious rebuttals are that they are motivated by emotion and that people do shitty things sometimes. My problem with both is that these are such extreme behaviours that they require a very good justification.
Once you start looking for plotholes, you don’t stop finding them. Think too hard about the character motivations and you realize that the map didn’t even matter at all. While the crazy research project that brings these characters to Aglo exacerbates their problems, everything that leads to their eventual dissolution pre-dates it.
A weak plot isn’t necessarily a death sentence for a book, even for a miserable critic such as myself. There’s a lot to love about vibes based books. The thing is, vibes based books, the good ones at least, usually have something else going for them. The Cartographers’ fatal flaw is that it has nothing to redeem its shitty plot and artificial characters. You probably thought the concept of a secret town hidden in a misprinted map sounded pretty cool. Me too, but wrong! Aglo is an empty movie set of 1930s pre-fab homes with nothing in it to discover but all the places you’ve already been that were too boring to remember. Does it have themes and messages? Sure, I guess. But these are so poorly executed that they’re hard to even entertain critically. The final answer to the map question is that, ‘a map is something that brings people together,’ but Nell only resolves the plot by apparently permanently removing herself from this plane of existence. Nothing about the book is effective because at a foundational level the wordcraft just isn’t good. The nadir is the sentence, ‘he’d been standing in a puddle, his shoes soaked to the bone.’ What the hell. Bone-shoes aside, the prose is bland and repetitive. Maybe its good that we don’t get to much figurative language if shoes with bones is where that will lead us, but the plain text resorts exclusively to repetition for emphasis. It never says anything in one sentence that it could say in three. And then again two paragraphs later. Nell shuddered. She felt sad and afraid. She thought about how strange it was that she was in this situation. Kill me now. I don’t know if any of the elements I’ve complained about in this screed could be fixed because the simple technique of stringing words into sentences is so poor.
I read a lot of books that I do not like but that I can easily discern why someone else would like them. The romantasy genre in general and Sarah J. Maas’s ouevre in particular are just not for me, but I do understand the appeal of diverse re-skins of the same fantasy boyfriend. But The Cartographers has me stumped because I just do not understand why anyone would want to write this. I don’t get why the melodrama of an aging friend group rolling itself over to the next generation is story-worthy. I don’t understand why the mundanity of the town is emphasized so much, as if the author is afraid that this will be mistaken for one of those embarrassing genre novels. I hope Shepherd got something out of this, because I sure didn’t.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death
olma's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Had trouble setting this down. It reminded me of a mix of “Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore”
by Robin Sloan and “Series of Unfortunate Events.”
That being said, I felt like the end was somewhat rushed and under-explained. Nell said she wouldn’t pick the map over her family, but she technically did and for some reason took months to actually reach out and let Felix know she was okay. Also, I felt like the explanation of the map wasn’t satisfactory. If all you had to do was make a map to create anything you wanted, why was it so important to put it into the Haberson map? He could have just drawn a map by hand theoretically and changed anything. I get that the danger was that he could control the world, but since other trap rooms /phantom settlements existed, there’s no reason Tam’s specific map needed to be uploaded (other than Wally’s obsession with her). I just didn’t feel like Tam staying away for 30 years actually needed to happen based on what actually happened and could have happened. Why protect that town from Wally when there could have been hundreds more? They literally could have tracked down any map with a phantom settlement.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Gun violence, and Murder
stormeno's review
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Interesting premise, but the “twist” was too predictable. Also, I feel like the book could have had a few more chapters to wrap up the loose ends.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Toxic relationship, Death of parent, and Gun violence
clarelou612's review
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
There were a lot of plot holes and as many others said, the fantasy or magical realism elements weren’t introduced very effectively. That said, I got into the plot and wanted to know how it would end so I finished it and had an enjoyable time reading it. I recommend reading the end acknowledgements section after finishing the book as it provides interesting true history related to the story and left me with a more satisfying end to the book!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Death of parent
coconutoolong's review
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Magical in the most mundane way! If you are a fan of liminal spaces, phantom towns/paper towns, or maps this is a must-read! This book is a wonderful balance of mystery and interpersonal relationships. All of the plotlines weave together beautifully, making it an even more engaging read.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and Death
tericarol21's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury, Death of parent, Violence, Death, Grief, and Gun violence
sarahflanders's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death of parent, Murder, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Confinement, Death, Gun violence, and Stalking
allapaz's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
thrilling mysterious dark academic, a worthy and wonderful adventure, I could see myself rating higher on a reread if some plot holes are resolved by me reading versus audiobook-ing as woof that’s a lot of details and characters for my oatmeal brain to remember without being able to flip back a page
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Death of parent, Infidelity, and Death
Moderate: Gaslighting