Seven years ago, Nell Young was on her way to her dream job after interning in the Cartography Department at the New York Public Library. Her father, the head of the department, had hinted that a position was hers. In her excitement, she went down into the archives hoping to make a big discovery. This action initiated the Junk Box incident, after which she found herself fired and unemployable. Eventually, she got a job finding and copying maps for decorative purposes. She hasn’t spoken to her father since.
Suddenly, she receives a call from Swann, a former co-worker, telling her that her father was found dead in his office. She goes there to talk to the police. The death appears natural, but they are looking into it. When she is sitting at her father’s desk, she surreptitiously presses a button for a secret drawer and finds a portfolio. Returning home, she finds a map in the portfolio—not just a map but the one that appeared to be worthless when she originally found it in the Junk Box seven years ago, an ordinary road map from 1930.
When Nell looks the map up, she finds that every other copy of it has either been destroyed or stolen. It appears to be valuable on the dark web, but prospective searchers are warned to beware of a mysterious group called The Cartographers.
If you read my blog, you probably know I have a tricky relationship with magical realism. Suffice it to say that I found this novel most interesting before the magic came in, which it did in a obvious way at about page 150.
But I even had some problems with the realistic parts—in particular, that scholars of cartography would take seriously the idea of the Dream Atlas, not to mention the subsequent project.
Another problem was the shift in narration. Most of the book is in third person, but several chapters revealing secrets from the past are narrated by various friends of Nell’s parents. First, multiple narrators need to sound like different people. Shepherd’s do not. Second, the style of third-person narration is different from speaking. Shepherd’s is not.
I guess readers who go into this novel just as an adventure story and don’t look at it too closely will enjoy it most.