Book Review: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

 

           Title: The Cartographers
            Author: Peng Shepherd
            Published: March 15th 2022 @ William Morrow
            Genre: Urban Fantasy  

            Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

“Maps are love letters written to times and places their makers had explored.”

I am firmly of the belief that I am the only person alive who both remembers and is still ride-or-die for the 2018 film Tomb Raider. Technically, this movie was meant to launch a franchise for the titular heroine played by an extremely fit Alicia Vikander, and technically the sequel is still somewhere in production limbo due to Covid-19 delays, but even at the time of its release, no one loved this movie but me. Critics called it silly (it was) and ripped apart the set design for its fake-looking rock formations (I’m not kidding), but as a die-hard Lara Croft fan from childhood, I was elated. 

Tomb Raider might be a little ridiculous at times, and you might need some serious leaps of logic to get on board with the plot that has Lara stranded on a deserted island searching for a Japanese death maiden, but at the core of it, Tomb Raider 2018 is a story about a girl who loves her father. She has a lot of resentment for how he abandoned her and a complicated relationship with the legacy she’s been left with, but at the end of things, it’s her love for her father that spurs on her adventure. She needs to find out what happened to him, and if he really is gone, what he died for.

The Cartographers, the newest offering from critically-acclaimed author Peng Shepherd (The Book of M), could so easily be a Tomb Raider story if you squint. No tombs are actually raided per se, but this book does follow a young woman who is thrown into an adventurous mystery due to the death of her estranged father and the gas station map he left behind. The book plays with themes of legacy and the lives our parents lead outside of our experiences with them, including the secrets they keep to protect us.

Nell Young is adrift at a dead-end job making reproductions of old maps in the years after her career as a cartographer is cut short. After an explosive fight over an old 1930s road map with her father, a famed map historian at the New York Public Library, Nell was summarily fired from her position as his intern and hasn’t spoken to him since. We meet Nell when she’s disgraced and hopeless, at a job that leaves her uninspired, and this is when she gets the call: her father is dead. 

From there, Nell is thrown into the mystery of the cartographers, a clandestine group of map collectors who have a particular interest in that 1930s road map that her father has puzzlingly kept all these years. What follows is the uncovering of her parents’ pasts, a slue of break-ins and murders, and a secret better left buried. The more we learn about the past, the more we delve into the years that led up to Nell’s mother’s death, with a delicious side of dark academia. 

The Cartographers works for exactly the same reason that Tomb Raider worked for me: at its core, it’s a story about a girl forced to reckon with the legacy left by a father she feels betrayed by. It’s about whether or not Nell is responsible for forgiving her parents for the things they did that hurt her, that at the time she didn’t understand. It’s a book about secrets, and what we would do to protect the secrets closest to us, and in the end, a book about what constitutes family. 

This is by no means a perfect book, and just like every Lara Croft property ever devised, it’s sometimes silly, sometimes predictable, sometimes lacking in character growth. These things, though, are definitely more than made up for by the propulsive plot, the engaging mystery, and that through-line of a woman’s relationship, however strained, with her father.