Reviews with content warning for Rape - Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer 🗺️
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

🗺️ The plot: When Lia receives an unexpected diagnosis, the news upends her life and those of her husband, teenage daughter, and elderly mother. Meanwhile, her body knows nothing of the word "cancer", just that Something is moving through it. Malevolent, yes. But also tricksy. Playful. It gambols through Lia's cells and the memories stored in her body, the loves and hurts she carries with her. These things are a part of her, bodily - what does it mean to let go? Will she or those she loves ever be ready for that?

When @mostardentlyalice was picking my TBR, perhaps it was a given that Maps would be on it. She has been championing this book since its release and I can totally see why - it is a triumph.

Written in playful, poetic style that takes a moment to acclimatise to then carries you along like a fairground ride, this book is both a tour through one woman's life, the ups and downs of desire and despair, and a portrait of a family struggling with anticipatory grief.

Half the story is narrated by Lia's cancer: a nymph that rummages through the mythic landscape of her body, describing organs and passages as fantastical landscapes peopled by dream-creatures from her life. It is the villain of the story, hungry to see and claim everything, determined it must survive. But these things also make it very human, very like Lia herself, not truly a villain. This is maybe the genius of the book, its ability to show that death is contained within life without simply saying it, of forcing the reader to even momentarily surrender to the acceptance of that fact. It's a grieving feeling, one of the good ones.

Naturally, to carry all this off, the writing is bonkers and beautiful and so brim-full of compassion for our past and future selves. What an absolute knockout of a debut!

🗺️ Read it if you like Ali Smith or Jessica Andrews (the vignette style of storytelling is similar here). Extra points for exploration of mother and daughter relationships and first love!

🚫 Avoid if cancer or anticipatory grief are too heavy for you to read about right now. Also if you hate experimental prose or poetry.

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agnesbebon's review

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5.0

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abvi's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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hilaryreadsbooks's review

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4.0

This is (to be blunt) first and foremost a book about death, about the anticipation of death. The daughter, a child watching her mother deteriorate, describes her jaundiced mother as yellow. The husband imagines waking up in bed without his wife. And the dying—Lia—sees her entire life mapped out to this point, narrated by the voice of disease, culminating in a heart wrenching ending where disease melds with woman, even as she says “body expansive. not mine.”

As woman and disease consider her body’s history, Lia draws connections from point A to point B, wonders if the coming death is from having sinned. There is an underlying tenor of punishment: perhaps she is sick from what has been done to her body. perhaps violence can stay within, even after all these years later, and manifests as something physical, claw its way forward into the present. So, while this is a book about death, it is also a book about living. As in, how to live with the knowledge of how utterly fragile our lives are and what to do with that fragility. As in, how to recognize strength amongst our fragility. As in, how we continue.

Pick up if you’re okay with feeling sad and progressively sadder and sadder, and if you like novel-in-verse.

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mmccombs's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

A debut book by such a young person really has no right to be this wonderful! From the very beginning I knew I was reading something special, the way Mortimer has experimented with form and voice is incredibly dexterous it’s almost breathtaking. I found the characterization of her cancer to be incredibly effective, it was a parasite and a monster but also an onlooker, a cohost, and an omnipresent narrator who lurked around every corner. I am still unsure I even scratched the surface of this book, so I’ve already put it on hold to listen to the audiobook performance so I can go through it again in another format just to see what i get from it that way. Truly so special and devastating I loved this so much!

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