Mapping Eden
In spare, lyrical prose, Mapping Eden invites the reader into the heart and soul of the child.
Winner, First Novel
2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
“No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling.”
When her dreamy, musical mother falls desperately ill, six-year-old Julia is terrified but forbidden to speak of it.
Her mother will get better, her father insists, if only she is left in peace. The dire prediction Julia hears in the schoolyard is, he declares, an ignorant lie.
Julia learns to pick out her clothes and goes to a neighbor's after school. When she approaches her mother's bed, she is told "Maybe tomorrow." As her mother grows progressively weaker and more withdrawn, her sweet memories no longer seem real.
Afterward, in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia searches for clues to a landscape forever altered. Who was her mother, and what does it mean to have had—and to have lost—her? Who is she, and how is she connected to her mother?
What People Are Saying
“A poetic reverie . . . a meditation on love and loss. A gift to the reader.”
— Amy Weintraub, author of
Temple Dancer
“Deeply touching and haunting.”
— Hilary Jacobs Hendel, author of
It's Not Always Depression
“Captures the essence of childhood.”
— Linda Louis, co-author of In the Paint
“Wonderful and moving. Beautifully and tenderly written.”
— Janina Fisher, author of
Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma