What they’re saying about Mapping Eden . . .

“I loved Mapping Eden. I loved the way it is written, believably, from a child’s eye view. I appreciated the careful pacing, the child’s sense of time that is played off against the timing of her mother’s illness and of her father’s constant attention to his watch, to the minutes left before it is time to leave for school or meet a taxi. A child’s world of everyday events is skillfully evoked and played against a larger history that has placed a refugee family in an apartment in Chicago. There are wonderful details of a child’s world: the feeling of the pavement under roller skates, the physicality of her mother’s presence, the pattern of the tiles in her kitchen. Then there is the world as it appears on the historical maps her father shows her, its outlines and borders changing over time, whole realities altered by new discoveries and endless migrations. She wonders, when the migrants arrived, ‘did they discover they had left something behind, something irretrievable. . . . Did they still carry an image that would never again be seen, some yearning that would never be fulfilled?’ Mapping Eden is a commentary on and a recreation of an effort to remember the Eden before loss, before the mother ‘slid out of reach, over that place where the earth curves.’ The author is ‘a diligent pupil, studying maps, gathering data, piecing together fragments to make a picture of the world,’ aware that what is lost is irretrievable, but hoping the stream of time will carry blessings from the garden.”

— Constance Waeber Elsberg, author of Graceful Women

“The character of a memory is a wistful thing, sometimes light and fluttering and other times, vibrant and powerful. This book recalls the character of memory as it paints a beautiful portrait of an immigrant child growing up in a foreign America and learning of her mother's illness -- but never being outright told about it. It recalls how neglectfully we can treat children even as we battle our own grief and denial of a loved one's decline and passing. Japha has a way with words that transport you into Julia's shoes, even if you share little with Julia, and have you experience her life as though you had been there, reminiscent (I'm not sure why exactly) of some of Twain's writing. After reading Mapping Eden, I felt like I had just taken a journey with Julia, and her trying to understand what happened to her mom and her own reaction to the events. There are no answers here, just more questions. But questions that anyone who has ever lost a loved one will recognize and feel. This is an engaging, heartfelt story worth the read.”

            — John M. Grohol, founder, psychcentral.com

“Written from the point of view of Julia, a young child who has little ability to make sense of the adults and the secrecy that surrounds her mother’s illness and death, Mapping Eden is a poetic reverie that reads like a meditation on love and loss. I entered the dream with Carol Japha and could have inhabited that territory for many more pages, hours, days. The novel is understated and yet breathtakingly intense. Japha’s language exquisitely expresses the inarticulate emotions of a young child who is not allowed to go to her mother’s funeral. Grief and loss are difficult emotions to convey no matter the ages of the characters. Here, the young child Julia is saved from the blind emotional brutality of a grieving and angry father and a grieving and angry brother, not by her well-meaning stepmother or any other adult in her life, but by a doll she calls Silly. Layer after layer of incident is added and then peeled to its essence.”

— Amy Weintraub, author of Temple Dancer and Yoga for Depression

“Carol Japha's new book, Mapping Eden, is the story of a child trying to make sense of her mother's illness and death. The power of this beautifully written book is that it is told from the child's point of view--her mother has disappeared and no one is talking about it. The silence and uncertainty force her to express her grief and rage towards her dolls.  As a reader, I identify with the child in her confusion and pain, and at the same time as an adult, I understand what she
does not. This double layer of empathy and emotion is
profoundly moving.”

— Deborah Dickson, director of
Frances Steloff: Memoirs of a Bookseller and Pluto and Me