The Mapmaker's Daughter

Caroline Dunford's The Mapmaker's Daughter is an interesting tale of political wrangling, betrayal and ecological disaster.

The Shift moves across the land bringing devastation in its wake. The Mapmaker's work to prevent this, but their battle to stop the Shift is becoming harder to predict.

The story starts with our MC, Sharra and her socially conscious sister Jayne being Waylaid by a man delivering maps to two towns. However, after his horse breaks it's leg, he has to commandeer a horse. Enter Sharra and Jayne. The Two Daughters of master Mapmaker, Milton.

It is from here that the story springboards off to give a view of the current happenings within the Milton household and the plot, which whilst having a slow start, full of intrigue and political machinations, eventually careers off to become a full blown adventure story.

The book is essentially a story of two halves, with the first half set in the Milton household, and the second half being set in the wider world. For me, I found that as well as being two halves to the book, there was also two tones to the book, with the first half feeling like gothic horror, reminding me very much of Daphne du Maurer's Rebecca, accentuated by the fact that Sharra's mother is a ghost like presence seeping through the essence of the first half of the story. We get constant hints that she is there and that there was some tragedy surrounding her death. Add to that the creaking eeriness of the house and it's forest like library that women are not allowed to enter as they may disrupt the balance. And the second half of the book becomes more of an action/adventure story.

It is obvious that Caroline Dunford likes fairy/folktales as she manages to bring in various tropes of fairy tales such as the evil stepmother who marries the father after the mother has died in tragic circumstances, and is totally selfish, only concerned with her own status, hating the stepdaughter and favouring her own. She also manages to get the tale of Stone soup in there, which is one of my favourite tales as a child.

On top of this she manages to bring in some prescient topical subjects with the main antagonist of the story, the Shift, which reflects current topics such as climate change and the effects of over resourcing the planet. And whilst Sharra's stepmother, Ivory, is the villain of the group (I didn't think I would ever get a Zappa skit in a review