“I loved Mapping Eden”

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 that is played off against the timing of her mother’s illness and of her father’s constant attention to his watch, to the minutes left before it is time to leave for school or meet a taxi. A child’s world of everyday events is skillfully evoked and played against a larger history that has placed a refugee family in an apartment in Chicago. There are wonderful details of a child’s world: the feeling of the pavement under roller skates, the physicality of her mother’s presence, the pattern of the tiles in her kitchen. Then there is the world as it appears on the historical maps her father shows her, its outlines and borders changing over time, whole realities altered by new discoveries and endless migrations. She wonders, when the migrants arrived, ‘did they discover they had left something behind, something irretrievable. . . . Did they still carry an image that would never again be seen, some yearning that would never be fulfilled?’ Mapping Eden is a commentary on and a recreation of an effort to remember the Eden before loss, before the mother ‘slid out of reach, over that place where the earth curves.’ The author is ‘a diligent pupil, studying maps, gathering data, piecing together fragments to make a picture of the world,’ aware that what is lost is irretrievable, but hoping the stream of time will carry blessings from the garden.

— Constance Waeber Elsberg, author of Graceful Women