Book review: Mysterious and fantastical, 'The Cartographers' will capture your imagination
By ASHLEY RIGGLESON FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR

Peng Shepherd’s work intrigues me. So, when I saw her newest novel, “The Cartographers” was available for review, I jumped at the chance.

“The Cartographers,” follows a disgraced scholar named Nell who quickly gets pulled into a mystery when her estranged father is found dead in the New York Public Library. Years ago, the two had argued over an old gas station map, and it had cost Nell her career as a scholar. So, when Nell finds the same map hidden among her father’s belongings, Nell’s only objective is to understand why he has kept this seemingly worthless map for so long.

She begins to investigate, a mission that takes her deep into the past where she learns about a group of friends, now defunct, of which both her parents were part. As Nell meets other members of the group, she learns more about her parents than she ever knew before. And of course, the map itself holds its own mysterious and magical secret.

Though several characters in the novel tell Nell that she will be in danger if she continues to pursue this line of questioning, Nell’s drive to understand what has happened pulls her forward. And it soon begins to feel as though her life, too, is in jeopardy.

“The Cartographers” is a heady mix of mystery and fantasy that will capture many readers’ imaginations. Shepherd excels at building a complex and yet fast plot. And though the novel can at times be quite dark and ethereal, there is a also a sense of wonder to this book that recalled to my mind childhood favorites such as Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

As with many fantasy novels, though, the line between good and evil is clearly delineated. My one complaint about this novel is that it is sometimes difficult to understand the villain’s motivations. And although these motivations do become clear in the end, my questions as I was reading the text sometimes pulled me out of a story I otherwise found to be very enjoyable to read. Despite this shortfall, I think many readers will find this magical story about ancient maps to be a necessary escape from our troubled world.
Ashley Riggleson is a freelance reviewer from Rappahannock County.

Ashley Riggleson is a freelance reviewer from Rappahannock County.

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THE CARTOGRAPHERS

By Peng Shepherd

(William Morrow, $27.99, 400 pages)

Published: March 15, 2022

This review was originally printed in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, VA

The Cartographers is one of those stories that sucks you in from the first page and some how leaves you wanting more when the story ends. Shepherd was able to take something as simple as maps and turn it into such an interesting concept.

I both loved and hated the how simple the magic system in this story was. Loved it because it made the story easy to follow but hated it because of how many unanswered questions we where left with at the end.

I also loved the way she did the flashbacks in the story. I feel like flashback POVs are usually a hit or miss and Peng did a good job of integrating them into the story.

All in all this was a fun read and I would highly recommend it for those who are new to the fantasy genre or looking for something on the lighter fantasy side.

The Cartographers is an adult mystery/thriller by Peng Shepherd. This book was incredible. It was not only one of the best books I have read in 2022, but this is a book that is going to stick with me for a long time. It is the type of book that you immediately run out and recommend it to everyone. I will never look at maps the same way again.

In The Cartographers, we meet our main character Nell. Nell is the daughter of two famous PhD parents who study maps. Her mother died when she was a baby in a house fire and her father was very respected in the maps department of the New York Public Library. Nell wants to follow in his footsteps and she was well on her way, until one day her and her father fought over a silly old road map from the 1930s. They became estranged that day and didn’t speak for the next seven years, until one day her father was found dead in his office. Nell is in disbelief, and even more so when she finds that infamous roadmap in his things. Why did he keep it after all this time? That commonplace map sets Nell off on an adventure into the past, where she will learn more about her parents and their graduate school friends than she ever imagined.

The Cartographers drew me in right from the start. This book was expertly crafted. There was not a dull moment and I could not put this book down. The Cartographer’s is a very, very special book. You won’t understand the magic of it, the magic of a map, until you read it for yourself. Holding this book in your hands and reading it, opened a whole new world to my eyes. Full of mystery and a touch of magic, the Cartographers is a contender for best book of 2022. This one is going to be hard to top!

This was a great story! I appreciated the parallel natures of the realism and fantastical elements of the story.

I have no idea what went wrong with this book for me. It started out so good. The whole concept of hidden secret clues hidden in maps - that is a real thing BTW - becoming a sort of magical/sci-fi concept of changing reality. Just wow. HOOKED. And then it dragged out for way too long with the whole back story, I was bored learning all the different sides of the Cartographers - though they were interesting people with a lot of character - it pulled me away from this adventure that I started out with. I wanted more Librarians type of book, and got.. well, not sure.

Loved the beginning and the end. Got bored in the middle. No matter, will pick up another book by this brilliant author,

I never knew reading a book about map making could be so interesting! Perfect mix of mystery, magic and secrets!

The Cartographers is the obsessive type of fun that academics have digging deep into the dusty, secret halls of the library. Set in the New York Public Library with its wood paneled walls, gleaming chandeliers, tall windows, and secretive archives, Peng Shepherd enchants ancient maps into a modern mystery. With a cast of sleuthing map makers at its center, a novel about obsession draws out old friends' secrets, lies, and betrayals.

Peng Shepherd draws us a road map inspired by Science Fiction & Fantasy readers' love for the maps in Fantasy novels.

Nell Young is the daughter of one of the NYPL’s most celebrated scholars. But when Nell comes across some very special maps in the archives, her father gets his daughter fired and her boyfriend. At the start of The Cartographers, Nell works in a shop called Classic. After being blackmailed by academia, Nell creates reproductions of ancient and rare maps for her romantically inclined boss.

It’s the characters that continued to pull me into this novel. Shepherd writes compelling characters with fun quirks.

Humphrey, her boss at Classic, has a love for the aesthetic of academia. He loves maps to have the look of ancient things. He loves the illusions that the way we, as fantasy readers, love the feeling of historical periods turning magical. He’s a tall gentle soul who loves to care for damaged things. In many ways, he adopts Nell as his daughter when her father isolated himself from her. I just think he’s such a swell gentle giant.

Authors, just wave around the ‘adoptive dad taking in the damaged child’ like a piece of candy. It’s pretty much a guarantee that I’ll be obsessed with them.

In the stories her parents' friends tell, she’s told of their research project, where they imagine what canonical Fantasy worlds would like as a real-world map. Narnia as New York. Earthsea. Discworld. Together, these friends drink wine and make maps for their Dreamer’s Atlas.

Peng Shepherd shows us that there’s magic in modern maps. And it seems she’s saying contemporary worlds are just as magical. In Shepherd's world, just having the map to these places provides magic. Seeing what’s behind the research gives us a door to magic. That’s what’s so interesting about this book.

A murder mystery with fabulism and dark academia (the real kind!) with a diverse cast of characters is sure to capture my attention. I’m just that nerdy. But it does have some significant faults which I’d like to mention. I’ll be very vague about spoilers.

In between the chapters are these first-person segments told by the old friends of her parents. They tell their secrets, passions, and betrayals directly to her. But it’s structured like we’re in a 1st person narrative. We see things they describe. They tell us their feelings. Other characters see things others don’t. That’s how the mystery starts to loosen.

Sometimes the problem with this structure is that it’s easy to forget how it looks once you look from a distance. The friends are like Nell’s uncles and aunties, like a found family gone wrong. My issue is they tell us things that don’t make logical sense. For example, it does not make sense to me why they describe the very intimate details of their relationships to Nell. That relationship dynamic makes no logical sense given what they tell her. These chapters also often end up creating plot holes. There are a lot of things I found messy and cluttered. Some bad execution went on in the actual structure and rules of the novel. Also, you find some things out about Nell’s parents that genuinely do not make sense. Essentially, Humphrey is the only natural parent here.

Like Gandalf trying to remember the words to open the door to another magical place, Peng Shepherd paints a story mimicking the idea that the map in our fantasy books is a key. A door for us to enter. The Cartographers is not perfect, but it is a fun adventure into the most hidden and intimately magical places of the library.

This is a page turner and I'd recommend it as a quick, fun read – as long as you don't analyze the logic of the magical realism too closely! It's set up as a mystery thriller and it feels exciting to follow Nell's investigation into her father's past. But the reality-bending mechanism being used by the cartographers has such promise but doesn't feel fully wrought – why are some magic maps drawn, others can only be found? can any map be magic? – and the SECRET CIRCLE backstory landed a bit disappointingly given the insane behavior of the villain. All in all, a fun romp and so promising, but falls apart upon reflection.

Nell Young's whole life had been leading up to becoming a cartographer like both of her well known parents but something horrible happens when she's interning at a position at NYPL that ruins everything. She is publicly humiliated and fired by her own father because of a seemingly worthless old gas station map that she had just discovered. Fast-forward to the present where she is now working at in a shop that mass produces famous maps because no reputable institution would hire her after being blacklisted by her father and NYPL. Nell is shocked to discover that her father has died at his desk at NYPL and in a compartment in his office where only Nell and her father knew about was the very gas station map that ruined their relationship and any chance of her dream job. She suspects that the map must have been more valuable than she first thought and maybe someone killed her father to get to it. She embarks on a dangerous adventure to discover everything there is to know about the famous Cartographers and their hunt for the very map Nell holds. In this story Nell discovers old family secrets, the real power of maps and how far her loved ones will go to keep her safe.

This book had everything; a promising plot, gorgeous cover and lovable main character. The cover alone is what drew me to the book and Nell's adventure and Peng Sheperd's writing kept me entranced until I finally turned the last page. I loved that each of the characters had a chance to talk durning a chapter and Peng Sheperd switched perfectly between the past and present to explain things to the readers. I don't think I was ever bored at any point in this book because once I finished a fascinating chapter I just had to read onward without stopping to discover what happens next. I guessed one of the huge plot twists before it was uncovered but the second one took me longer to figure out and I was shocked when it was finally revealed. I don't know much about cartography or maps and this book did an amazing job explaining everything to me in a way that I was not lost at all while reading the story. This story really had everything I could want in a story; found family, libraries/bookstores, magic, nerdy main characters, romance, mystery, thrills, and adventure. This was the first book I've read by Peng Sheperd and now I can't wait to read more by her.

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow/Custom House for the digital copy of this book with me in exchange for an honest review.

An interesting "what if" tale about maps defining reality instead of the other way around. Gets off to a pretty quick start, though I felt there was not that much difference in the storytelling as the perspective shifted between characters. They seemed to have the same voice.

Thank you NetGalley the publisher and author for an arc copy of The Cartographers.
I really enjoyed the writing style of this book and was easily swept into the story. I also found the plot fascinating and was excited to see the story unfold.
A downside for me was that there were some choices made by some of the characters that I felt were unwarranted by the consequences that were provided. And then when this is revealed, my reaction would be shock and anger but everyone seems totally chill and happy.
I'll try more by this author because I really did enjoy the writing and the premise. The characters actions just weren't believable to me in this one.

Very disappointing. The idea was really intriguing, I love academic thrillers--they are like the nerdiest kind of indulgence. Plus I love maps. I mean, who doesn't, right??? And as a fantasy fan, I can totally buy into the magical element that the author wanted to incorporate here. But unfortunately, this book just didn't live up to its potential. The story starts with Nell learning that her father has died at his desk at the map division of the New York Public Library. Years ago, Nell and her father worked together there, until he ruined her career and forced the library's leadership to fire her. Now, Nell finds the map that caused that entire incident hidden in his desk, and it sends her on a quest to learn the story of that map. Sadly, the plot was frankly ridiculous, and riddled with holes miles wide. The identity of the villain was obvious from the start. The transitions in the action from chapter to chapter were extremely jarring, sometimes the author would skip things and then never fully circles back to explain. Maybe she was trying to intentionally keep the reader off-balance? Well, this reader did not appreciate it. All in all, it felt sloppy to me. 2 stars because I like maps.

I was primed to love this - I am a librarian, after all. The beginning of The Cartographers was brilliant; it sets up the bizarre mystery of NYPL employees being murdered over a seemingly unimportant folding road map of upstate New York that captured my attention immediately. However, as the story went on, things began to fall apart for me. I can’t really talk about my issues without spoiling parts of the book (though I tried to be as vague as possible) so proceed with caution.

This is primarily Nell’s story, but every few chapters we get a POV from one of her parents’ friends who tell her their part of the story that happened in the past directly to Nell; however, there are so many characters and because we spend so little time with each I didn’t really care about any of them. I couldn’t keep anyone in the group straight! I also struggled to understand what was going on with the magic and the pocket universes created by the maps; it felt like it was only half-explained (which can be fine, I’m alright with a nebulous soft magic system that works in mysterious and slightly fuzzy ways) but there are so many plot holes and gaps in the logic that was presented that it actively took away from my enjoyment of the story as it went on. I could not understand the choices that Nell’s parents made given what we were told about how the maps work. I can accept that a map spontaneously spawned a pocket universe and that said map is the key to access the pocket universe, but since it is shown that the Cartographers use this map “quirk” to their advantage in many buildings and places, the implications are staggering and never fully addressed. Does every error or mistake on a draft of a map count as “enough” to generate a pocket universe? Does this make fantasy maps real? If a sketched map on a business card is enough of a map to get you to a place (and the finder doesn’t need the original map itself to get there), then why can’t the people who know where Agloe is draw another map of it to get there? What about photocopies or uploading pictures to the Internet?

Overall I still liked this book; it was fast-paced, the mystery kept me hooked, and the atmosphere was fantastic. This had so many elements that should have made this a new favorite for me, but it never quite came together in the way I felt this had the potential to.

I have trouble categorizing "The Cartographers", but my best attempt is academic mystery, with just a little bit of magical realism and romance thrown in.

The story centers of Nell Young, a map designer in NYC who was forced to leave her role at the NYPL due to a disagreement with her father, Dr. Daniel Young, an esteemed cartographer. She's lost touch with him for years, until he's discovered dead at his office, and she's pulled back into their history together and is forced to unravel the truth behind her mother's death.

The plot and storyline was promising and I overall enjoyed Peng Shepherd's writing, but there were a number of aspects this novel that I found distracting. First - the length of the novel. There are a number of passages and sections that seemed extraneous and didn't feel necessary to the actual storyline or character development. The pacing was slow, especially given all the time jumps between the past and present. Second - there's too many characters. Not only do we have to keep track of names and identities in the present, but we're also introduced to a large group of friends in the past, and rotate perspectives across them as well. Third - I understand this is not meant to be a factually accurate story, but there's so many plotholes and inaccurancies (the NYPL has definitely had many things stolen from it before) that it took away from the enjoyment of the story.

Not a bad read by any means, but not one I particularly enjoyed nor would recommend.

DNF at 70%. I think The Cartographers has a really interesting premise but it’s too slow and meandering for me. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance reading copy.

Yes!! Just yes :) I'm so happy to have found this book that was such a fun breath of fresh air - so wonderfully written, fully captivating and yet somehow still light and hopeful by the end. This book had a little bit of everything that I love - adventure, mystery, family drama, found family elements, action and even a bit of romance. I really enjoyed the reveal of the story through the differing voices of the characters, and the way that the characters came to light individually and as a group. The bits about cartography had me down a Google rabbit hole, and the mix of magical elements was just right. Nell grew on me as a character, and I would very much love to read a next chapter in her story. I couldn't share this one with friends fast enough.

You know when you take a cake out of the oven because it *looks* good, and it turns out to be inedible because it’s completely raw in the middle? That, unfortunately, is this book.

This was a GREAT idea for a novel. The premise is excellent and very appealing to bibliophiles and map-lovers alike, and the mysterious circumstances under which the book opens are the perfect set up for a bookish mystery. But the execution, alas, is a mess.

Had the story gone in a different direction (or perhaps just been through a few more rewrites), this could have been a fantastic story. Instead, it’s a nonsensical jumble of inexplicable character actions, a goofy magical realist element that feels out of step with the rest of the novel, and a black hole of thematic effluvia.

Too many disparate elements (the schlocky, sentimental tone that pervades feels like a mismatch with the flippantly handled pileup of dead bodies), and the pseudo Dark Academia backstory feels derivative and forced.

I’m sad, because I wanted to love this book. Maps! Academics! The NYPL! Mysterious cartographers! All wonderful ingredients, but when mixed and baked incorrectly, they don’t make for a particularly satisfying finished product.

An interesting read, but then I like maps. I know that we have already ordered it. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

THE CARTOGRAPHERS by Peng Shepherd follows Nell Young as she gets pulled back into the world of cartography when her well-renowned yet estranged cartographer father, Dr. Young, suddenly passes away while at work. Nell soon discovers that all is not what it seems and there are many secrets to uncover and a mysterious old gas station road map may have all the answers.

This was such a fun read that I sped right through, there were many aspects that I wasn’t expecting, first off, who knew maps were so interesting!? I am completely fascinated with them now and want my own magical map. Although personally, I wouldn’t class this as a fantasy, as it is definitely on the light magical realism side and along with it being a mystery, it is part thriller and full of adventures involving an intriguing group of friends. I really enjoyed that we got personal accounts, perspectives and backstories from Dr. Young’s friends, it added such a different level to the book which elevated it and created a lovely depth to the story. The book really could have solely been about them and their hopeful yet messy dynamic, their interactions were my favourite moments.

If I had one frustration with this story it is that I would have liked the motivations behind one of the characters
actions to be stronger, at times I was left confused as to why certain things were happening. That being said the subtleness of how the mystery unfolded was nicely done and I didn't want to put this book down.

When you read this book make sure you read the authors acknowledgements, it gives a whole new incredible dimension to the story and the map it’s based on!

3.5✨

A mystery centered around the New York Public Library Map Division. When Nell Young's estranged is found dead at his desk in the library, she is brought back into the world of historic maps. Her father had her cruelly fired from her job in the same department over a disagreement about a map and they hadn't spoken since. When the same seemingly worthless map is found in his possession at the time of his death, Nell starts to investigate and soon discovers that there is more to this map than she could have imagined. A great book for map and library lovers.