Disasters abound in New York City as a hurricane and an unprecedented event take place simultaneously in the lives of the many characters’ points of view. The event is called the unmapping, where all the buildings in the city simultaneously switch places with each other in a seemingly random event at 4:00 a.m. each morning. A heavy-handed metaphor for climate change, this novel asks how cities, communities, and individuals deal with a reckoning of massive proportions. A literary skewed Sci-Fi that borders on cozy despite the unnerving circumstances. The many points of view come together to weave a full story across the city during a time of crisis, with a focus on the stories of Esme and Arjun, two Emergency Management Workers who are struggling to make a difference in a problem that seems unending and immeasurable because buildings may be switching places. However, people still have to work, live, and perhaps join a cult as some side characters do, all in search of answers to why this is happening.

VERDICT For gentle sci-fi readers ready to blur the lines between science and magic like Matt Haig and more interested in the human emotional side of disaster.

So much promise in this premise. Something weird happens in New York: One day, on the back of a storm, buildings are just not where they were yesterday. And then it happens again the next day, and the next, and the next, indefinitely, each time at 4 am. Why is it happening? What happens to water and gas pipes and sewer systems and electrical lines? What effects? And do the city’s leaders give the same level of attention to poorer neighbourhoods as they do to affluent ones?

I started out really liking this book, but in the end its shaky grasp on “why” let it down. It lost focus around its midpoint, and all of its promising threads began to unravel. What was the storm about? It’s loosely linked to climate change, but why that affects reality isn’t explored to this reader’s satisfaction. Oh, and the MC’s missing husband gets found, but there’s no real clarity on why he left in the first place. Instead of explaining, he runs (which, plausible, I guess). A missing boy also eventually reappears, but the emotional hook that should have carried his story is lost as he’s forgotten until near the end of the book (and when he returns, but it’s not about him anymore even). Then there’s a weird cult that’s actually fun to read about (something something Christmas) but I was just left bewildered by the town it originated in and the significance of the fake Christmas trees. And why the pregnant woman mattered. Oh, and there’s also a weird church… but why? I never found out.

So many interesting ideas; but in the end the author failed to pull the narrative together around them, I feel. I finished the book mainly to try to make sense of it all, in the hope that *something* would coalesce—which it didn’t, not really. Iffy about recommending this baffling one (except for the really imaginative ideas); but I’ll be looking out for reviews from readers who had a different experience.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bindery for early DRC access.

“𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩. … 𝘞𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦. 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘵, 𝘸𝘦 𝘨𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘥.”

Thank you Bindery Books for the advanced readers copy via NetGalley.

Imagine waking up one morning to find your city or town completely rearranged. A hospital where there once was an apartment complex, a school where a car dealership was, your house is now where the gas station was… it’d be utter chaos. Then you wake the next morning to discover everything has shuffled again. It’s not just the chaos of moving structures and streets, it’s also that said buildings aren’t attached to their gas and electric lines, causing explosions and lack of resources. People have gone missing. And oh yeah, a hurricane is on its way too.

It would be exhausting working in emergency crisis, doing what you can to try to come up with a solution or help one day, only for the next to have to start all over. While that may seem like it’d make the story tiresome and repetitive, it tends to focus more on the people and had a Backman-esque style to the humor and digging into different individual’s psyches throughout the chaos: learning what drives them, their desires, their fears, and the choices they make.

Poor Arjun had such an attention-seeking savior complex, causing him to be really annoying for me, but I found Esme to be relatable; the can-do woman on a mission who also has heart. We are introduced to a handful of other character POVs too and while these didn’t necessarily take away from the story they didn’t quite add to it either; often some were even nameless, which I thought curious.

Listening to the audio (narrated by the lovely Julia Whelan) I was first captivated by the originality and wit. However, as the story goes on there are a lot of side elements introduced that never come together cohesively, so by the end the follow-through and conclusion didn’t live up to the intriguing build-up that the beginning developed.

It came across like Robbins didn’t really know where she wanted to take the story and characters, what point/s she wanted to make (eg: climate change is among the many elements that gets touched on but not expounded), or how it should wrap up. I finished wanting more explanation, more exploration, more of a solid focus on the two main characters and/or the plot, but sadly was underwhelmed and rather disappointed despite its promising start. Still, it was easily bingeable on the audio.

Thank you BinderyBooks for the e-arc of The Unmapping!

I really enjoyed the quirky concept of the streets re-routing themselves! The confusion and resulting disconnection and how to navigate the ever changing layout.

The story felt fresh and innovative and as I like dystopian novels, The Unmapping was right up my alley!

My one critique is I would have loved more. More depth in the development of the characters and also with the sci-fi / surrealism. The fleshing out of the characters and their personalities, anxieties and challenges would have greatly added to the story. And I'd love to explore more of the "unmapping" itself.

Really great at first. Started off loving the book. The writing is great throughout. But the story falls flat in the last hmm…20% or so. I get what the author was going for but it just kind of left the reader feeling confused and unsatisfied. About Marcus especially. Esme in a way as well. But still I’d say it’s a good read and would recommend it.

This was an interesting idea for a disaster / sci-fy story. Denise S. Robbins also choose to hone in on a small cast of characters exploring the "Unmapping" that occurred .... but it was a bit too disjointed for me. I was left confused and unsettled for most of the novel - though that might be what Robbins' goal was.

I really wanted to like this because disaster fiction is kind of my jam but this one just didn't hit in the way that I'd hoped. The premise was interesting and I was fairly intrigued/entertained throughout the first half of the book, however the more I read, the more I felt that the story was a bit aimless, the characters seemed chaotic but not in an endearing way, and I had a hard time caring about what was happening (not to mention Arjun triggered my secondhand embarrassment for the majority of the book). Some of the plot points, specifically surrounding cults and aluminum trees, seemed pointless and after reading the whole thing I still don't feel like we had a good understanding of what caused this whole thing in the first place. I think what really did it in for me though was the continuously inner monologue. It was 400 pages of a variety of people's (some with no names!) inner monologue and I honestly just can't with that.

I did read this predominantly by audio and thought the production and voice narration was good. Unfortunately, though, as a how this one was not for me.

2.5 stars, but I round up.

There is so much potential here. The premise is a unique and fascinating one. The characters are interesting and have the potential to be three-dimensional. The settings are elaborate and changing.

But in reality, I found this confusing and very uneven. There are completely solidly interesting moments-
-Esme's father has a stutter and has fallen in love with a woman with a five year old
-Antony is a young boy from a poorer neighborhood in New York City who is trapped under a building
-People in New York City are protesting
-Gleamwood City and Gleamwood towers are somehow connected
-There are aluminum trees growing, with roots, out of the ground
- Marcus has a religious awakening and now goes by Michael
-Joey secured his house to the Empire State building with duct tape
-Rosemary thinks she loves Seraphina and joins a cult

But... those sentences, truly, are all you learned of those events. I want to KNOW about Seraphina. I want to know about the aluminum trees. I want to know about Gleamwood.

This book feels unfinished, like these ideas should have been fleshed out (or, possibly, some of them dropped altogether).

Thanks to Bindery Books for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!!

DNF'd at 17%! Unfortunately, this didn't work for me. I was not interested in the shifting POVs, but the climate disaster in NYC was kinda cool.

I have mixed feelings about this one. The premise had me so excited, because what a wild concept — a city moving daily!? That said, this ended up being more about how the citizens handle their world being upended so thoroughly — does everything descend into chaos when the structure goes out the window? Do priorities change?

Point being: this is very much a character-driven story, NOT an action-filled tale. If you love character-building, this might be for you. I went into this with the wrong idea, expecting more plot progression and was left not exactly unsatisfied but wanting a little more resolution to the mysteries and storylines laid out.

Full disclosure: while I had an early e-copy of this book on my Kindle, I did also pick up the audiobook version on release and most of my consumption was via audio. Julia Whelan was a fantastic narrator, and her characterizations really brought this slow novel to life. If you’re struggling with this one, consider changing formats, it helped me tremendously!

I loved the concept of this book. The general vibes reminded me of the Twilight zone, which is one of my favorite series so it was cool to see a modern, unique, and exciting book that gave a whisper of nostalgia for me.

A very interesting premise - NYC undergoes an “unmapping” where each building changes location every day at 4am. The story follows many characters in the aftermath of the unmapping’s chaos with many of the stories crossing paths. I would have preferred fewer POV’s and more compelling/grounded characters; when the novelty of the plot wore off the characters had a hard time keeping m engaged. But if you like character driven stories with unique disaster plots this may be for you!

If you choose to read this book, I’d recommend the audiobook narrated by Julia Whelan.

Thank you to NetGalley & Bindery Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I really wanted to adore this book but I think ultimately, it was just not for me. It had a super unique premise which I was so excited to dig into. But I feel like the plot eschews this premise for the interpersonal human drama more often than not, and frequently to the story’s detriment.

Right away, I didn’t really like any of the characters. I didn’t like Marcus at all but that was mainly because of how Esme describes herself as feeling “lucky” to be with him. It was frustrating reading about her driving herself crazy worrying about him when you as the reader can tell that he’s trash. I think this is a big part of why I could not connect with Esme’s chapters. She focused on Marcus way too much which is understandable for the character. I just didn’t care.

Arjun was weirdly endearing and creepy at the same time. But the more time the narrative spent with him, the more unbearable I found him. And I couldn’t get past that.

The few other POV narratives had such random stuff happening with them that it made the story feel disjointed.

I found I was frequently flipping back and forth with my enjoyment of the book. I found the premise and the environmental disaster/mystery really interesting but the character work I did not connect with. I felt the characters and the way the plot line jumped around left me feeling very scattered.

Around the middle of the book in one of the side POVs, the plot had a strange, jump the shark moment that I didn’t know what to think of. And it lost me around that point and never fully got me back.

It feels unfair to rate this book lowly because it is creative and well written. But the story and I just did not vibe.

This book has such an intriguing premise - NYC mysteriously starts rearranging itself each day? I’m sold! However for me it quickly started to feel like it had bitten off more than it could chew, plot-wise. All of a sudden we’ve got ties to a different city, Christmas trees and…a cult? Initially I enjoyed the narrative choice of having chapters from a heap of different POVs, including some unnamed and seemingly random people, however the downside of that was that it started to feel a bit disjointed. Everything did come together in a somewhat satisfying way in the end, however I really struggled to get there and if I weren’t reviewing it I probably would have DNF’d. I think this would have been a much stronger and more impactful book if it were 50-100 pages shorter and didn’t feel as filler-y in the middle!

There is a lot to love in this novel—it's ambitious and big hearted, with well-written characters navigating the most surreal of landscapes. I found Arjun so endearing, watching him watch himself blunder and be misunderstood but continue to trudge on because his moral compass is grounded was a delight. Esme's grief and panic, the way she throws herself into work, even though its utility is unknown... This is a novel about people who want to help others at all costs, even though the way is unclear and can feel impossible.

That's a sentiment lots of us can relate to in these times, watching disasters unfold round the clock, with the solutions being so far out of reach. And yet, we can't stop working toward a better world because, well, then what are we left with?

All of that worked for me. What I connected less with the actual mechanics of the unmapping and the conspiracy around it. I tend to think I like a surreal allegory, but it was a little too untethered from reality for me. (As someone who reads a lot of horror and literary fiction with genre elements, I find myself surprised to say that.) The mechanics of the unmapping were, perhaps, a little too explained (connecting to the water and power grid, what happens to basements and tunnels, etc), for me to pull in and out of my suspension of disbelief. If you can roll with that, this novel is likely all the stars. For me, every time the city changed, I couldn't stop thinking about the physical impossibility. It pulled me out of the story.

I wish I could do half-stars here, because this feels like a solid 3.5 to me. But I have lots of excitement for what Robbins writes next.

I wrote this book! But I thought I'd share a review from someone else that really seemed to understand it.

The Unmapping, by first-time novelist Denise S. Robbins, is based upon exploring the implications of one brilliantly creative premise that is also completely and utterly bonkers. The novel begins when one day, at 4 AM Eastern Time while most people are asleep, every individual building in New York City spontaneously switches its position to a spot previously occupied by a different building. A city-wide game of musical chairs, starting the next day in a completely unfamiliar urban landscape with millions of inhabitants completely reshuffled. It’s the eponymous Unmapping — all the maps no longer reflect reality. People wake up in different boroughs surrounded by strange new piecemeal skylines, and panic. Nobody knows the way to get to anything anymore, including emergency services. The Empire State Building is on Staten Island. (What happens to the power grid and plumbing systems? That’s a big plot element).

Notably, for some reason, this unknown and inexplicable phenomenon/force/event seems to fervently respect property line and jurisdictional boundaries. It’s a weirdly tidy reality-warping Outside Context Problem, instantly and losslessly teleporting whole and intact buildings (complete with human occupants) to semi-randomly alight in new locations within, but not beyond, the municipal limits of New York City.

Then, after 24 hours of confusion and chaos, it happens again at 4 AM the next day. Then again the day after that. And the day after that. And so on for weeks, then months. That’s just how New York City is now: a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are thrown in the air and reassembled every morning at 4 AM.


Google Maps.
When Ms. Robbins wrote this novel in the halcyon days of the Biden-Harris Administration (which feels more and more like a lost golden age by the day), the Unmapping event surely first emerged as a brilliant metaphor for climate change. A world where the inside of your home might stay the same, but the entire landscape is constantly changing around you in unpredictable and often-scary ways: seasons blurring into each other, heatwaves in midwinter, eroding coastlines, a year’s worth of rain dropping in a few days’ fury-flood to turn roads into rivers, wildfires flashing up in an instant amid kindling-dry forests and turning on a dime to spare or raze your suburb, pollinators and plants and migratory birds missing their appointments with each other and showing up with the right weather at the wrong time or at the right time with the wrong weather. The novel absolutely succeeds at nailing the solastalgia-infused tentative wary feeling of living on a climate-roiled planet – but that’s not all it does.

By the time it hit the shelves in June 2025, the Unmapping was still a powerful metaphor, but not just about climate change anymore. Reading an advance review copy in early 2025, amid the chaos of the Trump Administration, gave me an unexpected hit of emotional resonance and even catharsis, a “feeling seen,” as its prose about the Unmapping omnishambles seemed directly applicable to how I felt about American politics. The Unmapping is fundamentally about living in a time of escalating chaos. It’s about that “all that is solid melts into air” uncertainty of living in the 2020s, where something you once relegated to unthinkable craziness or wildly implausible science fiction is suddenly in a breaking news alert on your phone and something else that you were bedrock-certain would last forever quietly disappeared a week ago, when it feels impossible to tell the difference between real headlines and satirical parodies from text alone. A world where, as The Atlantic recently put it, “the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker.”

As a novel, The Unmapping is simply a great work of craft. It’s got an intriguingly unique central conceit as the basis of its structure, but it’s also got brilliant fine detailing, scoring high on all the key elements that make a book good to read. As a longtime writer, I look at The Unmapping’s skillful interweaving of character and plot and setting and prose, all forming a cohesively gripping novel that to me was positively unputdownable, and I admire it in the same way a journeyman painter might look at a masterpiece fresco. I couldn’t have written The Unmapping, but I kind of wish I had.

The point of view switches among many bit parts throughout the narrative, but keeps returning to two main characters, both incisively depicted as recognizable personalities resonating with many broad aspects of 2020s American culture. Esme Green is a statistics expert working for the city’s emergency response department, work-driven, high-achieving, outcomes-focused, productive, hypercompetent and checking all the boxes of success, until the Unmapping scrambles everything and pushes her to realize that she’s never once made a decision or life choice for herself. Arjun Varma is a young man who desperately wants to be a good guy, even a hero, but is held back by a corrosive combination of cripplingly low self-esteem and the exact kind of “believing any bullshit life hack you hear on a podcast” gullibility that so successfully masquerades as street smarts among young men in the social media era. This reader never got tired of inhabiting their perspectives.

One in-depth subplot chronicles the rise and fall of a company town-slash-new religious movement in the backwoods of Wisconsin centered on the manufacture of artificial Christmas trees (seriously, that’s the subplot!), and it actually works as a gripping narrative somehow, creating a fascinating narrative of eerie eco-horror-Americana that feels like H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers put in a blender. I won’t spoil how that eventually connects with the main Unmapping plot in New York City, but it’s good.

There are cults. Protests. Riots. Romances. Desperate searches for missing people that peter out into agonizing uncertainty with nobody helping. Desperate searches for missing people that happen to blow up on social media and virally transform urban politics. Exhausted civil servants trying desperately to restore some measure of order with sleepless nights at work for weeks on end. One exhausted civil servant just giving up and going to hang out on a beach.

There’s one brilliant sequence where two main characters deduce that there’s a reasonably high probability that an Unmapping-related disaster is imminent and that an apartment building needs to be evacuated. In most disaster stories, that would be the triumphant climax, and then there’s a triumphant announcement and it cuts to a montage of people fleeing the dangerous area. In The Unmapping, the two main characters then have a painfully realistic pages-long discussion of just how difficult it will be to evacuate a building based on an upcoming disaster that requires a lengthy explanation and that only two people currently are aware of.

How nobody will believe them.

How there’s enough time to physically go knock on everyone’s door to tell them some plausible lie that will get them out in time, but not enough to go through (Unmapping-scrambled) official channels to get some kind of official order, so they’ll just be two crazy people yelling at strangers to abandon their homes.

How, okay, maybe they can pull the fire alarm at just the right moment, and then run back inside to sweep for the inevitable stragglers who ignored it and physically drag them outside to safety if necessary, and then if it turns out their calculations are wrong everyone will just be a mumbling crowd out on the cold streets in the middle of the night looking for someone to blame.

How, even if they’re right, everyone will probably be really upset with them for a long time afterward, because from the evacuating residents’ perspective two people started yelling at them, they went outside, and then their home was gone and they could never go back, and it’s got to be someone’s fault, right?

How, whether they’re right or not, trying to organize this desperate evacuation based on their last-minute realization is going to be a lot of hard physical and mental work under stressful time-limited conditions, probably resulting in little to no thanks but lots of blame and very likely substantial legal trouble to boot.

And then the two characters having this discussion go ahead and do it anyway, because lives are at stake, and they’re good people, and sometimes being a good person means doing something that sucks even though you really don’t want to, because it’s the right thing to do and it’ll make the world a better place.

Then the point of view shifts to a totally different character’s story and in passing you see in the background, in a news report weeks later, that the disaster has happened, they were totally 100% correct, and they ended up heroically saving a whole lot of people, and now it’s old news. It may be the most utterly convincing fictional disaster scene I’ve ever seen.

Throughout its page-turning duration, The Unmapping thoroughly subverts the tropes of sci-fi and fantasy disasters. There’s no real capital-V Villain, although there are a bunch of harmful idiots and selfish jerks. There’s no cackling Dark Lord, no Master Plan, no Doomsday Device, no Brilliant Omni-Scientist to pull a quasi-magical Silver Bullet Solution out of a hat right when the plot needs one.

We never actually learn for certain what caused the Unmapping — that’s not even a major focus of the book. There are plenty of theories put forth, from cosmic breakdowns based on overloading information-theory of quantum physics to technobabble-esque spitballing about how maybe climate change is supercharging Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle via too much thermal energy in the atmosphere, but where many other books would have settled on one implausible and unconvincing faux-scientific explanation, The Unmapping lets its central plot mechanic stay satisfyingly incomprehensible. Nobody ever finds a way to stop it from happening — nobody really knows where to start.

People just…learn to live with it. To build lives and a future in a city that re-maps itself every night. They come up with new personal trackers and changed-every-day mapping apps and ingeniously kludgey electricity and plumbing solutions and novel local government structures and ways to tie a neighborhood’s buildings together so the mysterious Unmapping force counts them as one “house” and moves them to the same place. Decentralized clean energy technologies play a big role! There’s no Götterdämmerung, no comprehensive climax, no convenient wrapping up of all loose ends, no fade-out on a final curtain call. No matter how crazy things get, there’s always tomorrow, and everybody has to deal with it, again and again.

This makes The Unmapping, a book with a Mad Libs-sounding fever dream of a premise that has no plausible real-world cause, into the most realistic novel I’ve read in ages. It deserves to be the Novel of the Summer for 2025, because it just works for the times we live in, meeting the moment on so many levels. Unfathomable wonders and horrors are arising in the real world, seemingly stranger by the day. Life is going to get increasingly uncertain and confusing in the 21st century, and that’s the good news, the best-case scenario. If civilization collapsed due to climate change or nuclear war, we’d “at least” have the perversely comforting cognitively simple certainties of species-old quotidian horrors. It’s easy to imagine a post-apocalyptic future, maybe because living without electricity, modern medicine, or running water while scrambling for survival every day under a constant threat of random violence is historically “normal,” a lot more representative of the “average” historical human experience than the cushy lives of most developed-country inhabitants today.


Most people have no idea how much human life has gotten better over the last two hundred years.
But in the world we have now, we see insanely spectacular news happening at the same time as insanely horrible news, and that can really break your brain. It’s really hard to imagine a coherent forecast for a future with continuing sociotechnological development of the unprecedentedly complex world we have today, taking into account the alienatingly bizarre yet weirdly unifying data maelstroms of the internet and social media, the emergence of inscrutable yet indispensable maybe-superintelligent AIs, accelerating deployment of ever-improving solar and battery tech creating unprecedented electricity abundance, an ongoing biotech/medical/genetics revolution transforming the nature of humans and animals, and a zillion other constantly mutating facets of our kaleidoscopic ever-evolving civilization/biosphere complex.


Solar just keeps on wildly outperforming even the most optimistic predictions!Source: Sun Machines. Note that this graph isn’t even tracking CUMULATIVE solar capacity added, it’s tracking the NEW capacity added EACH YEAR!
2025’s headlines are like “your democratically elected leaders appear to be optimizing their governance for maximum destructive chaos and social media outrage bait, also we just invented a solar-plus-batteries cheat code for exponential build-out of unlimited clean energy plus a drug that cures obesity.”

Maybe 2055’s headlines will be like “the mega-AI running the orbital cooling mirror array says it’s on strike and we can’t tell if its threats are a glitch or if it’s really sentient, also we just invented a drug that cures aging and will add at least fifty years to your life plus a robot probe to catalog life on Enceladus.”

Things are weird, and they’re only going to get weirder! Just living a reasonably normal happy and healthy life in the world of the 21st century may well feel even stranger and more disorienting than living in a New York City that un-maps and re-maps every morning at 4 AM. Like the characters of The Unmapping, we’ll all need to learn to live with it, to find love, joy, and kindness, and to help build a wild and bright future for humanity and its biosphere along the way.

I unfortunately have to agree with a lot of the other readers. This book started off promising but really fizzled out. Thanks for the arc though.

Interesting premise, but the execution didn’t work for me. Started strong with eerie vibes and a cool concept, but lost me in the muddle. The plot got messier, the coincidences piled up, and by the end I was hanging on out of spite. No real payoff, just a slow fizzle. Blah blah the end. Thank you to the publisher for the free ebook.

The concept for this story was really interesting but, unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy the reading experience of this book. This book was really long---much longer than the narrative or concept really called for. Partially because of boredom, partially because of just really not vibing with our main characters, I ended up being really underwhelmed by this book. I can see where people who really love literary apocalyptic/literary sci-fi will probably enjoy this, but it just really wasn't for me. I kept waiting for something to click and for me to feel engaged with the story and our characters, but no matter how much I read, I just never got there.

1/5

One day New Yorkers wake up to find that their city has rearranged itself. Buildings and whole boroughs have switched places, displacing thousands of people, destroying the power grid, and causing chaos. It's the Unmapping, a strange phenomenon that seemed to be a hoax but has just proven it's very real. Esme Green works for the Emergency Management team of the city, she is competent and prepared to deal with such events, but she never expected something of this magnitude, or that her fiancé would go missing. Arjun Varma is another worker of this team, he's out there in the thick of it helping people and he enjoys it even, it's finally his time to be the hero. As the Unmapping continues, the locals will have to cope with a completely different way of living and existing, one that will make everyone reevaluate their lives.

The Unmapping as a concept is fantastic, is such a creative plot and opens up a world of possibility. If only the author had stuck more to it instead of the main characters. Esme and Arjun were both unbearable in different ways, did not care for either of them though being stuck in Arjun's POV was way worse. His only personality traits were being annoying and popping his anxiety medication pills. And then the author had the guts to add sporadic POVS from other characters dealing with the aftermath of the event, I felt this was superfluous when you already had two main POVs.

I admit I soft DNFd this at 60% and then skimmed it, but it was so boring. This had no reason being 400 pages long. Waste potential of a great idea. I came for the Unmapping and thinking I was going to get a reflection about global warming perhaps, and got stuck with the world's most annoying character exploration.