Mapping Eden: A Novel

"No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling."
When her dreamy, musical mother falls desperately ill, six-year-old Julia is terrified but forbidden to speak of it.

Her mother will get better, her father insists, if only she is left in peace. The dire prediction Julia hears in the schoolyard is, he declares, an ignorant lie.

Julia must learn to pick out her clothes and go to a neighbor's after school. When she approaches her mother's bed, she is told, "Maybe tomorrow." As her mother grows weaker and more withdrawn, Julia's sweet memories no longer seem real.

Afterward, in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia searches for clues to a landscape forever altered. Who was her mother, and what does it mean to have had—and to have lost—her? Who is she, and how is she connected to her mother?