Nell Young is a cartographer whose father was a legend in that field. She had idolized him, but he spurned her after an argument over an old gas station highway map. She had thought it was worthless, but after her father was found murdered, she discovered the map hidden in his desk, and decided to investigate why it was so important to him.

Discovering what was so special about the map puts her own life in danger, along with opening up her life not only to intrigue but to magic.

I enjoyed the bits about cartography much more than the supernatural parts. The novel attempts to be a sort of Dan-Brown-esque thriller with its mix of arcana and suspense, but I didn’t find it all that compelling - too many stretches of the imagination were required to make the plot consistent.

This over-long story is high-concept all the way, and the book metamorphoses into outright magical realism around its midpoint. The shift is a bit jarring: at the outset an unearned, somewhat forced set-up—a vaguely drawn father, an eminent scholar, rejects his daughter (also an academic) for reasons as seemingly unpaternal as Lear’s. Then, after seven years of mute estrangement from her, he dies at his desk.
The daughter, galvanized by the event and convinced Dad was murdered, sets out on a quest that puts her life in grave danger. A familiar opening, and a creditable start under thriller conventions, except for the discrepancies in logical plotting and emotional truth that plague the narrative. It seems our heroine was rejected by her scholar boyfriend at the same moment her father spurned her, and still burns with romance-novel heat for his return, which of course comes quickly to pass as the plot itself heats up.
There’s a 90-year-old map at the center of the story that unleashes remarkable effects and drives the narrative, which itself offers a near-Dickensian batch of unmaskings among the dead father’s circle of friends from grad school, the so-called ‘Cartographers’. So the motor here is a string of revelations, but the narrative pyrotechnics sparking from this circle of close associates, a group materialized right out of TV’s Friends, don’t quite override the logical flaws: for one thing, almost everybody in the group seems to have inadequately explained smaller-scale magical maps of their own workplaces, which enable close escapes when the cops or bad guys loom.
Also, the ending (before the two-page coda that aspires to set everything right) is frightfully unfaithful to the emotional states-of-mind the author is at pains to set up in her lead characters, notably the heroine, her erstwhile boyfriend, and her long-missing mom. This book, at times nicely written, strikes me as the deadline first draft that the publisher’s editors will help the author slap into proper shape for the marketplace.. This is a narrative too driven by extreme coincidence and--I'm sorry to say--an overdose of contrivance.

I loved this book. It was unique and exciting. Great characters and fascinating story. Taking an everyday object and looking at it differently was amazing.

This is a great book. It plays with the idea of reality and what makes something real. What is someplace existed but it didn’t? How would you get there? How could you prove it really existed not only to yourself but to everyone else?

QUICK TAKE: I am an enormous fan of Peng Shepherd's BOOK OF M and still recommend it to friends and family. Her latest, THE CARTOGRAPHERS, is an excellent idea, but the execution ultimately left me wanting more. I love the idea of magical mapmakers, but the story is grounded a bit too much in reality. I needed more magical realism, and the ending left me a bit unsatisfied and I had trouble understanding some of the character motivations. That being said, I will read whatever Peng writes, so looking forward to seeing what else she has in store for readers.

Nell Young has followed in her father’s footsteps into the field of cartography, and while she regards him as a role model, she has not seen or spoken to him since he fired her and ruined her professional reputation. It was a ridiculous argument over a seemingly worthless gas station map, but when Young is found murdered in his office at the New York Public Library with the same map on his chest, Nell wonders if there is something more about the old map. When she begins researching, Nell discovers that the map is one of a kind, and therefore, priceless. It seems all other copies of the map have been tracked down and destroyed by someone who will kill anyone who stands in his way. The question about why someone would kill over what seems to be a meaningless map takes Nell through a rabbit hole into her family’s somewhat questionable past. This story is so much fun! Literate and engrossing, Shepherd has peens the perfect mystery with a feisty heroine