The Mapmaker's Children

 

The Mapmaker’s Children by Sarah McCoy  336 pages

The Mapmaker’s Children spans two centuries with overlapping areas of commonality. But first, we must meet the two women who are the story’s main protagonists: Sarah Brown is an artist and the daughter of abolitionist John Brown. A century and half later, Eden Anderson is starting a new life in West Virginia with her husband Jack. Told in mostly alternating chapters, Sarah’s story occurs in the years between 1859 and 1889. Eden’s story is much more condensed and lot less well developed; it occurs 2010-2014. Sarah’s story could have stood on its own, but the addition of Eden’s and her discovery about the house she lives in succeeds in uniting the two women.

When readers first encounter Sarah, she is very sick. The severe dysentery leaves her barren. Eden and Jack have been trying everything to conceive a child for the last seven years.

Barely well, Sarah rises from her sick bed upon hearing the voices of her father and two of his most trusted allies. She volunteers to paint landscapes that can be used as maps in their work with the Underground Railroad. She has learned the quilt codes and other means of communicating to the runaway slaves the path to freedom.

After her father’s hanging for his instigation of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Brown family stays in close contact with the Hill family of New Charlestown, West Virginia. She and one of the Hill sons, Freddy, develop deep feelings for each other. Those feelings grow, but Sarah refuses his proposal due to her infertility.

When Jack brings home a new puppy, Eden wants nothing to do with the golden furball. She is considering leaving Jack. Yet is the newly christened Cricket who finds the door to the root cellar. As it is opened for the first time in many years, Eden finds a porcelain doll’s head. As fascinated as she is by the discovery, it becomes a secondary plot in Eden’s sections of the book, yet it is important as it unites Sarah and Eden and the house they both share. The main plot in Eden’s chapters is watching her develop close ties with the neighbor girl, Cleo, whom Jack hires as Cricket’s caretaker.

Thankfully neither woman is subjected to a sappy the-doctor-was-wrong-now-and-I’m-pregnant ending. It’s much better.

I give The Mapmaker’s Children 4 out of 5 stars.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.