"No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling." When her dreamy, musical mother falls desperately ill, six-year-old Julia is terrified but forbidden to speak of it. Her mother will get better, her father insists, if only she is left in peace. The dire prediction Julia hears in the schoolyard is, he declares, an ignorant lie. Julia learns to pick out her clothes and goes to a neighbor's after school. As her mother grows progressively weaker and more withdrawn, her sweet memories no longer seem real. Afterward, in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia searches for clues to a landscape forever altered. She looks for "the footprints, the markers" of what she had, and what she lost. Who is she, and how is she connected to her mother? In spare, lyrical prose, Mapping Eden invites the reader into the heart and soul of the child. It plumbs the mother-daughter bond and the shattering impact when it is broken. It traces the path from loss and grief to hard-won understanding. A natural for book groups; discussion guide available at mappingeden.com.