The Cartographers

The Cartographers

By Peng Shephard

Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.

But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable and exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence . . . because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one—along with anyone who gets in the way.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret and discovers the true power that lies in maps . . .

I was super pumped by the first few chapters, by about halfway, I was getting very doubtful about the possibilities of the book, and when it ended, I spent at least a good ten minutes righteously racking up all the plot holes and things that I thought were dumb.  First on the list was the hinge of the book, that two parents decided that the MOST REASONABLE thing to do, when presented with a somewhat out of order friend, was that one of them WOULD STAY HIDDEN FOR THIRTY YEARS, while she DREW A MAP, and the other would tell their three year old daughter that her MOTHER HAD DIED IN A FIRE.  Yes! YES!! This is what two (I assume) sane people thought was a good solution to the fact that one of their friends had gone gonzo and burned a bunch of gas station maps.  Let's back up though.

Nell is Dr. Young's daughter. Her mother died when Nell was young, saving Nell from a fire. Dr. Young is a preeminent cartographer at the New York Public Library. Although Nell used to work there too, the fulfillment of all her childhood dreams, her father got her fired one day after she opened up a old donation box in the museum and found a gas station map.  Since then, seven years ago, she's worked at a second rate art map place and has not spoken with her father.

She gets a call that her father died in his office, and she finds the gas station map in a secret compartment of his desk (nifty, right?).  She begins showing it to various people, trying to understand why he kept it.  Someone else we don't really care about is murdered.  No wait, two people! (that's how little we care about them).  She learns about a secret group called the Cartographers (silly name, but okay, still with you), and finds out that long ago in grad school (danger!) her parents and five other people formed a group who really liked maps.  Eventually they graduate and, with one thing and another, find an old gas station map from the 1930s with a "phantom settlement" on it, i.e., a deliberate error that was designed in order to ferret out copyright infringement of their map.  However, they realize that when actually using the map, they can see the settlement, and enter into this "town", which is basically a shell, like that fake place Indiana Jones found himself in for the nuclear test during Indiana Jones 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So naturally, they get super into the town, and some of them try and map it, and some of them cheat on their partners, and some of them go crazy and decide to beg, borrow, or steal all the maps in existence that show this town.  

When things unravel, as naturally they do, paranoia reigns, the cheating partners get caught, in revenge one of them steals a map from the crazy dude (Wally) and then tries to sell it back to him for money, and he finds out and goes crazier and he burns all the spare maps.  Except woah! Nell, the three year old afterthought who was being raised in a map lunatics commune is somewhere in the fire, so her mother runs in to get her, and then hands her off to Dr. Young. Meanwhile, as the maps go up in smoke, everyone, sans mother, wakes up in a field, since they no longer have the secret map.  They decide, hey, have to explain mother's disappearance and child's burns somehow, so they burn their own house down, and then never talk to each other for the next thirty years. Except! Dr. Young discovers that Nell's mother hid a last copy of the gas station map on her child as she rescued her from a burning building, her final act of caring about a map more than her own child (or is it?).  So he hides it in a box of old junk at the public library (as you do).

Nell discovers all this over the course of her investigation and (crucially) that all maps with these "phantom settlements" - which can be as small as a fake door, or a fake room - have this super power.  She and her old lover Felix, who is now working for the mysterious William Habberson - a man who is rarely seen in person, and incredibly focused on some sort of technological map thing that requires every input ever made and then it... answers all questions? Unclear - tootle around discovering things and wind up back at the original site of the phantom settlement with the map and none other than William Habberson, who turns out to be crazy Wally (Surprise! But also, duh), who was searching for another copy of the map for the last thirty years, and then they go in, and find Nell's mother, and realize this was part of some scheme cooked up by Nell's mother and father in which (and this made bonkers sense to me, so forgive me if I'm not explaining this correctly) they decide that in order to protect... themselves? from Wally, the mother will stay in town and make a map, and the father will pretend he doesn't have the map.  And then, when the mother's map is finished, she can come back out because... there'll be another map and that will make it okay???

No, seriously, ?????????????

 Anyway, in the midst of all this, yet another person is murdered by Wally, and they find out that the mother did create a map (so sick of typing the word map) and Wally tries to make her scan it into his super MacGuffin digital database and Nell does... something, I don't know, moves it by writing on it (??) and the settlement disappears for everyone else, again, and then six months later Nell sends out invitations to everyone to come see the secret town. And then the book ends.  

And no, I am not leaving out huge chunks of the book, and no, I am not making anything up. So now that you're caught up, and in no particular order:

1. Was there ever any doubt that the mysterious Wally would in fact be the William Habberson that only Felix has met in person? 

2. Is there any point to the fact that Nell is dodging the police detective's phone calls and in-person conversations (and is he following her and assuming she murdered her father? If so: why on earth?).

3. If her father had a secret compartment in his desk, why (a) tell her about it and (b) not hide the map there? Or, and here's a radical idea, tell your daughter it's the last map her mother ever gave you, and it's sentimental, so she doesn't tear it up or throw it out or anything?

4. How on EARTH did her parents spend more than two minutes thinking their plan made any damn sense? As soon as he found the map, why not immediately use the map to get back to the town, rescue the mother and give Wally the damn map.  At that point in time, no one knew he murdered people.  They just knew he was bonkers for maps, and in love with the mother.  Save her, give him the other and voila! No more obsession!

5. Man, if I found out my mother abandoned me when I was three to sit and draw a town map for thirty years, I would be pissed.

6. How did it take thirty fricking years for her to come up with a reasonable map of this place?

7.  How did Wally manage to find ALL THE MAPS of this place in a single summer in 1990, without the benefit of the internet? Somehow, magically, all the people going through their old attics never found another old map after that point in time? Because if so, you'd think Wally would have snapped it up and visited the town a long time ago, revealing this stupid plan for the master piece in idiocy that it was.

8. How come the mother was stuck in town, but no one else? Sure, she had a spare map, but then, so did Nell (and Dr. Young, who was holding her after the fire).  Was the mother looking at the spare map when all the other ones burned? And how come no one else, after several people realized that Wally was stashing all the other copies, thought maybe it would be useful if all seven people didn't rely on a single map to get in/out of this place.  Just take one for each person.  Like hotel room keys.  I get annoyed if there's only one key for two people. As soon as any of the others realized that more copies could be found, the most natural thing to do would have been to stash a spare copy for all the other cartographers.

9. The better plan, obviously, even if they went along with the absurd hiding thing, would have been for Dr. Young to anonymously tip off the police that Wally was in the same place as all these people who got murdered and that he's obsessed with this map.  Then, when he's in jail, spring your wife from map-purgatory. Mapurgatory.

10. For that matter, the whole point of this map was that it was used to catch out copyright infringement, which apparently Rand McNally and the other mapper were doing.  So shouldn't all the maps from 1930, not just the ones from this particular company, have the settlement and can be used to find the town?

11. And how come no one experimented with the idea that making a map of a real place with a fake place on it makes the fake place real? That would have been the first thing they should have done.  How realistic of a map does the drawing have to be? Does the intent of the phantom settlement have to be pure, or can anyone who wants to have an ice cream parlor down the street add it onto a map and bango presto!  We find out later that doodles really do create things - the mother adds a restaurant and hospital to the town, and Nell moves (still have no idea how she did this using a ball point pen, but whatever) the town by drawing it. Seriously, no one tries re-drawing the map?

12.Wally has spent thirty years going through all the maps at the New York Public Library, but Nell finds it in one afternoon looking at a box of junk on her day off?

13. Once he knows that Wally knows he has the gas station map, (a) it still takes Dr. Young seven years to decide he needs another map with a backdoor exit and (b) he says nothing to Nell about this whole thing.

14. Wally keeps murdering people without actually getting the last map.  Poor strategy. You'd think after murdering Dr. Young and still not finding the map, he'd actually have like, waited to murder the director of the library until after having map in hand. Unless he just likes murdering people, which is assuming facts not in evidence.

15. Wouldn't it have made so much more sense for Wally to use Felix to get close to Nell and get the map??? Instead of like, infiltrating the library, why not just tell Felix, "Hey, there's this map Dr. Young had of mine, and if Nell ever mentions it, can you let me know?"

16. NONE OF THE PLOT ABOUT HOW THE TOWN DISAPPEARS FOR SOME PEOPLE IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE MAP MAKE SENSE. EITHER SEVEN PEOPLE WERE USING A SINGLE MAP TO GET IN AND OUT OR THE MAP ONLY WORKS IF YOU'RE LOOKING AT IT, BUT NOT BOTH.

17. Haha, eight people. I keep forgetting they had a toddler with them.  As they do themselves, it seems.

18. Why not just print tens of thousands of your map, Dr. Young, and send them to all the people who had their maps stolen or sold to Wally? It'll take him a while to track them all down, and at lease one person will hang onto their map, thinking it'll make even more money when the other copies are mostly sold.  This plan has the side benefit of tempting Wally to murder more people, giving them more opportunities to TELL THE POLICE WALLY IS MURDERING PEOPLE.

19. Seriously, Wally is not some criminal mastermind here. I'm pretty sure he still has DNA, even if he can get in and out of places using maps with secret exits.

20. I can't even.

21.WAIT, I forgot a big one.  WHEN YOU BURN DOWN A HOUSE, THEY DON'T FORGIVE YOUR DEBT, THEY ARREST YOU FOR ARSON. I'm pretty sure they knew what "arson" was in the 1990s.

01: A Book Published in 2022