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alexlily's review against another edition
4.0
Moderate: Violence, Murder, Death, Death of parent, Gun violence, and Kidnapping
lantheaume's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury and Death of parent
Moderate: Gun violence and Death
Minor: Injury/Injury detail
emmonsannae's review against another edition
- 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
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.
Moderate: Murder, Alcohol, Death, Death of parent, and Fire/Fire injury
hello_lovely13's review against another edition
- 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
Graphic: Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and Death
Moderate: Infidelity, Murder, and Gun violence
3mmers's review against another edition
- 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
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.
Moderate: Death
olma's review against another edition
- 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
Moderate: Death, Gun violence, and Murder
stormeno's review against another edition
- 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
Moderate: Death, Toxic relationship, Death of parent, and Gun violence
clarelou612's review against another edition
- 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
Graphic: Death and Death of parent
coconutoolong's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Moderate: Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and Death
tericarol21's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury, Death of parent, Violence, Death, Grief, and Gun violence