“A poetic reverie”

Written from the point of view of Julia, a young child who has little ability to make sense of the adults and the secrecy that surrounds her mother’s illness and death, 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. Japha’s language exquisitely expresses the inarticulate emotions of a young child who is not allowed to go to her mother’s funeral. Grief and loss are difficult emotions to convey no matter the ages of the characters. Here, the young child Julia is saved from the blind emotional brutality of a grieving and angry father and a grieving and angry brother, not by her well-meaning stepmother or any other adult in her life, but by a doll she calls Silly. Layer after layer of incident is added and then peeled to its essence.”

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