Julia views the world around her as a child, not understanding her mother's illness, her father's coldness, her new stepmother and the disappearance of the world she knew around her. Beautifully written . . . the tender growing years are portrayed as sweet and heartbreaking.

--Next Generation Indie Book Awards
(Winner, First Novel and Finalist, General Fiction)

Mapping Eden is a poetic reverie that reads like a meditation on love and loss. I entered the dream with Carol Japha and could have inhabited that territory for many more pages, hours, days. The novel is understated and yet breathtakingly intense….

--Amy Weintraub, author of Temple Dancer and Yoga for Depression

The power of this beautifully written book is that it is told from the child's point of view. . . . As a reader, I identify with the child in her confusion and pain, and… as an adult, I understand what she does not. This double layer of empathy and emotion is profoundly moving.

— Deborah Dickson, director of Frances Steloff: Memoirs of a Bookseller and True Hearts

Understated yet intensely emotional. . . . Japha renders her young protagonist’s experience with sensitivity and an exquisite eye for historical and psychological detail…

—IndieReader

I loved Mapping Eden. I loved the way it is written, believably, from a child’s eye view. I appreciated the careful pacing, the child’s sense of time . . . the wonderful details of a child's world. . . .

— Constance Waeber Elsberg, author of Graceful Women

Japha has a way with words. . . . This is an engaging, heartfelt story worth the read.

--John Grohol, coauthor of Self-Help That Works and founder of PsychCentral.com

What a gem of a book this is—written in prose but read as poetry. . . . The mid-century vibe is captured in beautifully expressed aspects of that time and place, breathing life and realism into the story. We are drawn in. . . . A read that stays with you."

--Goodreads review

This book was truly special. . . . Read it for yourself. You will love it!"

--Goodreads review