I’ve written before of my love of books with maps. During March, while I was madly writing for the Slice of Life Challenge, I read two books were maps were not only included to support the reader, they played significant roles in each story.
The Golden Specific by S. E. Grove, is the sequel to The Glass Sentence, which I wrote about in July 2014.
Goodreads Summary: It is the summer of 1892, one year since Sophia Tims and her friend Theo embarked upon the dangerous adventure that rewrote the map of the world. Since their return home to Boston, she has continued searching for clues to her parents’ disappearance, combing archives and libraries, grasping at even the most slender leads. Theo has apprenticed himself to an explorer in order to follow those leads across the country—but one after another proves to be a dead end.
Then Sophia discovers that a crucial piece of the puzzle exists in a foreign Age. At the same time, Theo discovers that his old life outside the law threatens to destroy the new one he has built with Sophia and her uncle Shadrack. What he and Sophia do not know is that their separate discoveries are intertwined, and that one remarkable person is part of both.
There is a city that holds all of the answers—but it cannot be found on any map. Surrounded by plague, it can only be reached by a journey through darkness and chaos, which is at the same time the plague’s cure: The Golden Specific.
The third and final book, The Crimson Skew, is due to be published July 12, 2016 and that is not so far off that I will forget what happened in this one.
I also read The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig.
Goodreads Summary: Nix has spent her entire life aboard her father’s ship, sailing across the centuries, across the world, across myth and imagination.
As long as her father has a map for it, he can sail to any time, any place, real or imagined: nineteenth-century China, the land from One Thousand and One Nights, a mythic version of Africa. Along the way they have found crewmates and friends, and even a disarming thief who could come to mean much more to Nix.
But the end to it all looms closer every day.
Her father is obsessed with obtaining the one map, 1868 Honolulu, that could take him back to his lost love, Nix’s mother. Even though getting it—and going there—could erase Nix’s very existence.For the first time, Nix is entering unknown waters.
She could find herself, find her family, find her own fantastical ability, her own epic love.
Or she could disappear.
This one was interesting and got me thinking again about Captain Janeway of the of the Starfleet starship USS Voyager, who, when faced with time travel, said, “Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I’d never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes – the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.”
Captain Janeway and all other Star Trek characters were subject to the Temporal Prime Directive. All Starfleet personnel were strictly forbidden from directly interfering with historical events and are required to maintain the timeline and prevent history from being altered. It also restricts people from telling too much about the future, so as not to cause paradoxes or alter the timeline. But Nix’s father is not a Starfleet Captain and answers to no one but himself. Book two is expected sometime in 2017, so, you have a lot of time to read this. Unless you have access to a map that will take youth the future.
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