”I thought we were going to be friends forever. I thought nothing could tear us apart.”

More like books-about-maps and not books-about-books, but similar? Kind of a mediocre story with a super fun premise. A weird intersection of thriller, maps, and the New York Public Library is where you’ll find this book hanging out, and honestly it’s a very tough book to rate because of it. I don’t have a lot to compare it to.Nell Young is an ex-cartographer, who once had her dream job working with maps in the NYPL, but was fired by her dad after a disagreement involving an old box of Junk and a gas station map. Now she produces fake replicas to hang on hotel walls, but dreams often about returning to her old job. That old gas station map comes back to haunt her after her father is found dead at his desk at the NYPL, and she soon discovers that it’s more dangerous than she ever knew.Larger story/ending thoughts and spoilers:So, like, how cool is it to be able to go literally anywhere as long as you have a map that says you can go there? I loved that idea, and wanted the author to play around with it a little more than just setting the story in Agloe, NY (which is a real (fake) place, actually) and creating convenient bolt holes for the characters to hide in for plot reasons.I felt a little let down by the mystery as well. Once I could see where the story was going with Nell meeting the old friend group one-by-one, it became glaringly obvious that Wally was William, just by name alone. A mystery that is no longer a mystery becomes a bit boring to me. It also read like a love letter to the NYPL. Which, don’t get me wrong, deserves all the love letters ever, but got a bit repetitive in story format. Nell waxes on for paragraphs about all the details she misses from the NYPL, details that no doubt exist but the average reader probably has a hard time connecting with. So, in non-spoilery general terms, I felt let down by the mystery, but did love the overall idea of the book. It was an entertaining enough read, but maybe not entertaining enough to rate it higher.