A highly inventive novel that pushes the boundaries of reality.
A disgraced cartographer unravels a 30-year-old family secret hidden within the folds of a 20th-century gas-station highway map.
Seven years after Nell Young and her ex-boyfriend Felix were publicly shamed and fired from the New York Public Library’s Map Division—by none other than her own father, Daniel—following what she thinks of as the Junk Box Incident, Nell has settled for “adding flourish” onto printed replicas of maps at a store in Crown Heights. After she discovered a box of rare 18th-century maps and one doodled-on 1930s highway map in the library's basement, her father declared them worthless fakes and inexplicably got so mad at her for disagreeing with him that he had her fired; they haven't spoken a word since. Practically cartography royalty (Nell's late mother was a visionary in the field, and her father is the senior curator for the NYPL’s main branch), Nell lost more than her reputation when she lost her internship at the library. Unlike Felix, who was immediately hired by the elusive William Haberson of the logistics and navigation company Haberson Global, Nell’s had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for cartography jobs. But when Daniel is found dead at his desk with that very same highway map in a secret drawer, Nell begins to wonder if the map hides more than meets the eye. When she decides to do her own research, she uncovers an implausible relation between the map and her parents and soon learns of a competitive, dangerous group known as “the Cartographers” who are willing to pay—or kill—for the only copy left in existence. Shepherd plots page-turning twists and revelations with ease and excels in her knowledge of historical maps and cartographical mysteries. The inclusion of map diagrams and detailed flashbacks carry the reader right alongside Nell as she attempts to disentangle an increasingly complex, slightly supernatural secret. In an author's note, Shepherd promises that “something magical happens” when a person follows a map that lies, and this book will make you believe it.
A highly inventive novel that pushes the boundaries of reality.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-291069-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.
No matter how much you’ll want to look away from the callous injustice and horrific abuse depicted here, this period thriller’s investment of urgency and imagination keeps you riveted.
It's 1950 and the relatively sheltered life of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida, is changed forever when he comes to the aid of his older sister, Gloria, who is harassed by the teenage son of their town’s wealthiest white man. Though Robert does nothing more than kick Lyle McCormack, reprisals only begin with Lyle’s father brutally boxing Robert’s right ear. Robert is soon handcuffed, dragged away by police, and given a quick trial. He's sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, euphemistically known as “The Reformatory,” an institution known for racism and brutality toward its adolescent population. Thirty years before, a fire at the school killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried in a gravesite on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates who died prematurely (and mysteriously). Somehow, Robert can communicate with these dead boys’ ghosts, and the institution’s creepy and corrupt Warden Haddock promises Robert early release if he will somehow help him put these “haints” in something called a “collection jar.” And yes, the spirits are out to get the warden, too. For revenge. But mostly, they want Robert to help set them free and let them be at peace. Meanwhile, Gloria is fiercely, doggedly determined to set Robert free, using whatever legal means are available to a young Black woman in the still-segregated South, including the NAACP. Like Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer–winning The Nickel Boys (2019), this novel is based on Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys. Due brings her own gifts in the supernatural-fantasy genre as well as elements of her own family history (the book is dedicated in part to her great-uncle, who died at Dozier in 1937) to this vividly realized page-turner, which is at once an ingenious ghost story, a white-knuckle adventure, and an illuminating if infuriating look back at a shameful period in American jurisprudence that, somehow, doesn’t seem so far away.
A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781982188344
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.
A web of friendship among millennial Black women stretches across several decades.
Desiree, Nakia, January, and Monique grew up together. They haven’t all known each other since childhood, but they came into adulthood together, navigating the tumult of their 20s, 30s, and 40s. At the opening of Flournoy’s novel—the first since her acclaimed debut, The Turner House (2015)—Desiree is 22. The year is 2008 and she’s traveling to Zurich via Paris with her grandfather, who plans to die the next day through assisted suicide. Her grandfather is all the family she has; her mother is long dead, her father long absent, and her relationship with her older sister, Danielle, deeply strained. She feels herself adrift and without prospects, but as it turns out, Desiree’s destiny is, in large part, as the anchor of her friend group. Flournoy toggles back and forth in time and perspective across the women, a structure that makes the book feel more like linked stories than a novel with a typical narrative throughline. This enables each woman to be deeply, prismatically rendered: Monique is a librarian-turned-influencer; January is a melancholic mother of two sons; Nakia is a lesbian restaurateur. (Desiree’s sister, Danielle, receives a narrative interlude, as well.) They endure hookups and breakups, Covid-19, financial woes, careers, caregiving—“the wilderness of adult life.” It’s easy to marvel at Flournoy’s precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it’s the book’s hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth. By setting select scenes—including the novel’s shattering climax—in the near future, Flournoy seems to warn that the violence and oppression characteristic of 21st-century American life can be mitigated only by community, care, and the families we choose.
Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780063318779
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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